THOUGHTS 



ON THE 



Decalogue 



BY 




HOWARD CROSBY, 

PASTOR OF THE FOURTH AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 
NEW YORK. 



PHILADELPHIA: ; 
PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 
1334 Chestnut Street. 




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 

THE TRUSTEES OF THE 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Westcott & Thomson, 
Stereotyfiers and Electrotypers, Phila. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

THE PREAMBLE 5 

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 23 

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 41 

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 61 

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT.. 78 

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 106 

THE SIXTH, SEVENTH, EIGHTH AND NINTH 

COMMANDMENTS 129 

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 147 

3 



Thoughts on the Decalogue. 



The Preamble. 

I am the Lo?'d thy God, which have brought thee out of the 
land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. — EXODUS xx. 2. 

GOD has several times spoken directly 
to men without the agency of inspira- 
tion, using some power in nature other than 
a rational medium. Thus has he spoken to 
Moses, to Elijah and Job, to the apostles on 
the Mount of Transfiguration, and to Paul 
near Damascus. 

But although God has thus frequently 
spoken to men, he has but once written a 
message to his creatures. The Decalogue 
stands alone as God's manuscript. Of it 
it is said, "The Lord s^icl unto Moses, 



6 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



'Come up to me in the mount and be 
there, and I will give thee tables of stone 
and a law and commandments (that is, a 
law of commandments) which I have writ- 
ten? " and then afterward it is said, " And 
he gave unto Moses, when he had made an 
end of communing with him upon Mount 
Sinai, two tables of testimony, written with 
the finger of God." 

Still again it is said, " And Moses turned 
and went down from the mount, and the 
two tables of the testimony were in his 
hand : the tables were written on both their 
sides ; on the one side and on the other 
were they written. And the tables were 
the work of God, and the writing was the 
writing of God, graven upon the tables." 

These are the accounts in the Book 
of Exodus. Afterward, An Deuteronomy, 
Moses recapitulates to Israel God's ways 
with them, and then/ at the close of their 
desert life of forty years, the venerable 
leader of Israel says of the scene at Sinai, 



THE PREAMBLE. 



7 



"The Lord spake with you out of the 
midst of the fire ; ye heard the voice of the 
words, but saw no similitude ; only ye heard 
a voice, and he declared unto you his cove- 
nant, which he commanded you to perform, 
even ten commandments ; and he wrote 
them upon two tables of stone." Then, 
after repeating the ten commandments, he 
says, "These words the Lord spake unto 
all your assembly in the mount out of the 
midst of the fire, of the cloud and of the 
thick darkness, with a great voice, and he 
added no more ; and he wrote them in two 
tables of stone and delivered them unto 
me." 

These tables thus prepared were broken 
by Moses beneath the mount under a right- 
eous impulse of indignation at Israel's fear- 
ful sin. But he was again called up to the 
top of Sinai, and the order he received is 
thus given by Moses himself : 

" At that time the Lord said unto me, 
6 Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the 



8 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



first, and come up unto me into the mount, 
. . . and / will write on the tables the words 
that were in the first tables which thou 
brakest; . . . and I hewed two tables of 
stone like unto the first, and went up into 
the mount, having the two tables in my 
hand ; and he wrote on the tables, according 
to the first writing, the ten commandments." 

So these second tables, which were pre- 
served in the ark nearly a thousand years, 
although they were not themselves prepared 
by God, as were the first, but were hewn by 
the hand of Moses, bore, nevertheless, as 
much as did the first, the autograph of the 
Almighty. It is this fact which exalts the 
Decalogue to the very highest rank of all 
recorded truth. It must be truth of the 
highest importance to man that receives so 
distinguishing a mark at the hand of God. 
We cannot restrict its application to a single 
people, a single locality or a single age. The 
thunderings and lightnings, the trumpet- 
noise and smoking mountain, formed a fit- 



THE PREAMBLE, 



9 



ting framework for the divine speech, and 
indicated the limits of humanity to be the 
sole limits of its application. The rest of 
the law given to Israel had none of this 
awful majesty of publishment. All the de- 
tails of ceremonial service and civil order 
were given to the people through the media- 
tion of Moses, spoken by him and recorded 
by him. They were evidently intended for 
a special nation and a limited period, and it 
is they of which Paul speaks in the Epistle 
to the Galatians, when he says that " the 
law was added (or attached) because of 
transgressions, till the seed should come to 
whom the promise was made ; and it was 
ordained by angels in the hand of a media- 
tor ;" for the Decalogue did not pass from 
God through either angels or mediator, but 
came direct from God to all Israel. 

It becomes us, then, to study with deep 
reverence these words so remarkably given 
— these spiritual aerolites that sought our 
earth directly from the upper world. 



10 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



We find, at the very first glance, that they 
are exceedingly simple. Every one can 
readily receive and understand them — they 
have relation to human action in spheres 
where human action is universally found. 
They are therefore exceedingly practical, 
though by no means merely of outward 
force. They relate to the action of the 
heart as of the life. Loving, honoring and 
serving are enjoined, which directly regard 
the affections. 

It is a common misapprehension of the 
ten commandments to restrict their mean- 
ing to overt action — to the visible life. The 
rich young ruler who came to Jesus with 
such animation, and went away so sorrow- 
ful, made this mistake. God's law is not, 
like man's law, a mere recognizer of the 
overt and visible, but touches the whole 
man, and is therefore specially concerned 
with the inner springs of life. It sees the 
whole value of the outward activity to be 
ia the condition of the soul, and hence the 



THE PREAMBLE. 



1 1 



apostle, in terse apophthegm, says, " Love 
is the fulfilling of the law," and hence our 
Saviour translates the whole Decalogue 
thus, using the very words of Moses, and 
using, too, a formula known to the Jewish 
people: " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart and with all thy soul, with 
all thy mind and with all thy strength ; . . . 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 

Thus we see four characteristics of these 
wonderful commandments : first, their uni- 
versality ; secondly, their simplicity ; thirdly, 
their practicalness ; and fourthly, their spirit- 
uality. 

In regard to their structure and analysis, 
they consist of ten distinct precepts and a 
preface. Let us look at the preface before 
we examine the first precept. 

"I ci7n the Lord thy God, which have brought 
thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house 
of bondage " 

Bearing in mind the universality of the 
Decalogue, this " land of Egypt" and " house 



12 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

of bondage " must have a far deeper and 
wider signification than the Valley of the 
Nile. We find, from other parts of Scrip- 
ture, that the land of Egypt, from its pecu- 
liar relation to God's ancient people, became 
typical and emblematic of that which might 
be oppressive and inimical to the truth. For 
example, the great city which destroys the 
witnesses, or rather holds their dead bodies 
unburied, as given in the Apocalypse, is 
called "Egypt." Rev. xi. 8. So again, 
when the prophet Zechariah makes use of 
the name in the following passage, he evi- 
dently does not intend the literal Egypt, 
which had already lost its independence : 
" I will bring them again also out of the 
land of Egypt, and gather them out of 
Assyria, and the pride of Assyria shall be 
brought down, and the sceptre of Egypt 
shall depart away." When the prophet 
uttered this, Egypt had no sceptre, and 
Assyria no existence as a nation ; and we 
are forced to one of two interpretations, 



THE PREAMBLE. 



T 3 



either a literal one which implies that Egypt 
shall be again resuscitated as an independ- 
ent empire and Israel again dwell therein, 
and that Assyria shall be a^ain resuscitated 
as an independent empire and Israel again 
be captive therein, or the figurative one 
which points to God's spiritual Israel in a 
spiritual captivity to a spiritual Egypt. 

If it be asked which is to be accepted as 
the true interpretation, I cannot see any 
ground for the literal. I believe that both 
here and elsewhere in the Prophets Egypt 
is a synonym for an ungodly world, which 
captivates the heart of man, and from which 
the grace of God releases the renewed soul. 

The law of God is, therefore, in its holi- 
ness, justice and goodness, held up to those 
who have been delivered from the bondage 
of sin — those who have been released from 
the spiritual Egypt. It is not so held up to 
the ungodly — they cannot love it, they can- 
not see its beauty. The law of God is given 
us as a rule of life, not as a means of salva- 



14 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



tion. By the Lord's telling us that he has 
already brought us out of Egypt and bond- 
age, he does not say when he gives us the 
law, " Do this and live," but, " Since ye live, 
do this ;" 4< Since my grace has redeemed 
you, and you rejoice in the liberty of the 
children of God, use my law, the reflection 
of my perfections, as your beloved guide." 

This is the position of the Decalogue to 
us. It is not addressed to the unconverted, 
save as a condemning law. All the message 
given to them is, " Be reconciled to. God." 
When they look at the law, they see what 
does not belong to them, and so see it all 
awry, and they read it, " Do this and live," 
instead of, "Live and do this." Thus they 
get themselves into a great deal of trouble 
in trying to work out a holy life from unholy 
material, sometimes deceiving themselves 
into thoughts of success, and sometimes 
giving way to a despair which is very legiti- 
mate from their premises. No ; we cannot 
repeat it too often that the law in its love 



THE PREAMBLE. 



15 



and obedience is only for God's Israel ; for 
the rest it is simply a monument of con- 
demnation, a token that they are unholy 
and cannot keep it. 

The law comes before the gospel his- 
torically and logically, but the gospel comes 
before the law biographically and practi- 
cally. The law is the token and standard 
of holiness, but the gospel is the gate to 
that holiness. 

We are saved by the free grace of God 
which the Gospel proclaims — we are saved 
by simply letting Christ save us, by appro- 
priating his precious promises, by doing 
nothings but by believing ; % then, after that 
salvation, we are shown the holy, just and 
good law of God as our rule of life, our 
pattern of holiness ; and the new nature, 
which we have through faith in Christ, is 
able to appreciate and obey it with more or 
less perfectness, according to our amount 
of faith and sanctification. The greater our 
faith, the greater both our obedience to and 



1 6 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



our love <?/~the Decalogue. In the triumphs 
of an exalted faith, we say with David, " My 
soul hath kept thy testimonies, and I love 
them exceedingly." 

There is another portion of the preface 
to the law which points to this same exclu- 
sive application of the law to the people of 
God. It is this, " I am the Lord thy God," 
or, literally, " I am Jehovah, thy God." The 
word " Jehovah" designates, not God the 
creator and general governor, not God the 
all-powerful, all-wise, all-knowing and omni- 
present, not God in his essential excellence 
and character, but God the lover and re- 
deemer of his people, God who promises 
and brings salvation, God in his special 
relation to his own faithful ones. When he 
delivered Israel from Egypt, God first prac- 
tically disclosed this name as his name to 
his Israel. Of it he says himself to Moses, 
when the exodus was about to take place, 
" I am Jehovah ; and I appeared unto Abra- 
ham, unto Isaac and unto Jacob, by the 



THE PREAMBLE. 1/ 

name of El Shaddai (God Almighty), but 
by my name Jehovah was I not known to 
them ; . . . and ye shall know that I am 
Jehovah your God which bringeth you out 
from under the burdens of the Egyptians." 
Now, the Decalogue is given to those who 
can call God "Jehovah out God," our special 
Saviour and Deliverer from sin, and to none 
else. Let this not be misunderstood. I am 
not excusing any sinner from the condem- 
nation of disobedience and sin. They are 
all invited to make God "Jehovah their 
God," and for rejecting that invitation they 
must suffer the just results of their depravity 
and sin. But it is only when the heart re- 
cognizes Jehovah as its own God, when it 
comes over and joins the true Israel, that 
the law can be operative in it. The effi- 
ciency of the law as a rule of life is built on 
the faith which accepts God as the deliverer 
from sin's bondage. The law is a holy thing, 
and nobody has anything to do with it but 

those who are made holy in Christ. There- 
2 



18 



THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



fore, unconverted sinners, seek Christ, if you 
want to keep the law ; you can only reach 
the law through him. 

There is one other expression in this 
preface which should be noted. It is the 
use of the second person singular, "which 
have brought thee out of the land of Egypt." 
There are two thoughts connected with 
this use. The first is that God deals with 
all Israel as one man. He expects them 
to be one, of one mind and one' heart, be- 
fore him. There must be no antagonisms 
among God's people. Bickerings, whether 
ecclesiastical or private, have no place in 
the Church of our Redeemer. They are 
Satans in the camp, adversaries to be ex- 
cluded and destroyed. There are twelve 
encampments with twelve 'standards, but 
there is only one tabernacle and only one 
Moses, and the twelve tribes unite as one 
family and march in harmonious ranks. 
If Christians differ in taste and outward 
name, it is well ; but if they mark their 



THE PREAMBLE. 



I 5 



difference by bitterness and hostility to any 
degree, they are destroying the unity of the 
Spirit, which is only maintained by the bond 
of peace. Superciliousness, censoriousness, 
coldness between Christians of whatever 
name or names, are as inimical to Christian 
unity as are open contention and calumny. 
The latter may be more conspicuous and 
make more immediate trouble, but the 
former are just as devilish in their origin 
and texture, and their results are perhaps 
even more fatal by reason of their more 
secret working. There is one bond which 
should bind all believers together — the love 
of the common Master ; and in this love all 
differences should sink to nothing, or, at 
most, become mere harmless theories. He 
has taken us out of the contentious world, 
not that we should be only another conten- 
tious world, but that we should show on dis- 
tracted earth the harmony of heaven. He 
wishes to reconcile all things unto himself. 
He is our peace, who hath made Jew and 



20 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

Gentile, men the most opposite in view and 
feeling, one. Sin divides men, grace unites 
them. 

The other thought regarding the use of 
the second person singular here is this : God 
treats man individually. Man enters heaven 
or hell, not in companies or battalions, but 
in naked individuality. Sin is personal, 
condemnation is personal, salvation is per- 
sonal. Social sin and social morality are 
delusions, or, at least, figurative phrases. 
Society has no conscience, heart or purpose ; 
it only has a history. It is the individual 
alone who has the moral attributes, and who 
makes society and social history. In this 
way I see that God's law comes directly to 
me — not to me as a member of society, but 
to me as an individual man, with a heart and 
conscience, which heart and conscience the 
law would fit, if there were no society on the 
face of the earth. You, my Christian reader, 
are as personally addressed by God in this 
holy law as if the entire Church of Christ 



THE PREAMBLE. 



21 



consisted of you alone. " That brought thee 
out of the land of Egypt." It was thyself 
personally that wert delivered from that 
dark Egypt of condemnation, was it not? 
It was thyself personally that received the 
benefit of Christ's paschal death, was it not ? 
i\nd so you can say, " Who loved me and 
gave himself for me!' 

And now, shall the holy gospel concen- 
trate its beauty all on your own single self, 
and the holy law be denied an equal concen- 
tration with its equal beauty ? No, no ! 
Jesus, when he redeemed you, meant to 
sanctify you. The gospel was his means, 
but the law was his end. 9 It is his own gos- 
pel and his own law ; and just as his love 
is personal to you, so are both gospel and 
law (the one the expression of his love, the 
other the summons to your love) personal 
to you. When we can say, " I am my Be- 
loved's, and my Beloved is mine," I'm sure 
we can say, too, " Oh how love I thy law !" 

My unrenewed reader, if this law is not 



22 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



for you, because you are not adapted to it, 
it is a witness against you through that non- 
adaptation. God has offered to put you in 
relation with that law through the gospel, 
and your non-acceptance of the divine grace 
is a witness of the deep power of sin in your 
heart. God's voice of offer, and God's voice 
of condemnation, are as personal to you as 
his giving of the law is personal to every 
follower of Christ. They are as personal 
to you as if God and you stood alone in the 
universe. God recognizes only the indi- 
vidual. "Thou art the man," is his judg- 
ment. Your sin is personal — you know it ; 
your condemnation is personal, fearfully 
personal. May you know that, so as to 
make your salvation personal in our Lord 
Jesus Christ ! 



The First Commandment. 



"Thou shall have no other gods before meP — Exodus xx. 3. 

WE have noted that the Decalogue 
was universal in its application, and 
simple, practical, and spiritual in its charac- 
ter. We have also noted that its preface 
teaches — (i) that it can only be appreciated 
and honored by God's own people, and (2) 
that God deals with each man separately, and 
with his own people as made one in Christ. 
We now enter upon the consideration of the 
first of the ten commandments : 

u Thou shall have no other gods before 
me? 

"Before me" is "in my presence and 
as Jehovah is everywhere present, it means 
" anywhere." Wherever a god is set up in 

23 



24 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

the entire universe, it is set up in the pres- 
ence of Jehovah. The idea of God in the 
human mind involves the notion of a su- 
preme being who is governor of all, and to 
whom is due the homage of all. Even poly- 
theism has to place over its many subordi- 
nate gods one thus supreme. It is an intui- 
tive demand of the mind. Now, the mere 
making and using of a wooden or stone idol 
to represent a god is, we see at a glance, by 
no means requisite in order that the soul 
shall subjectively have such a god. The 
outward statue is perfectly harmless in itself, 
and is only dangerous as connected with the 
ideal god represented by it and supposed to 
be mysteriously united to it. This command- 
ment really has nothing to do with the sub- 
ject of gross heathen idolatry, the use and 
worship of visible idols. The second com- 
mandment looks in that direction, but this 
takes higher ground and calls the soul to 
the contemplation of first principles. It 
might be read in the singular, " Thou shalt 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 



have no other god before me," and I believe 
that is the more correct way of reading the 
word " Elohim" in this passage. It declares 
that Jehovah will have no rival for supreme 
homage — that the heart of man shall recoe- 
nize none but himself as God and guide. 
The reasons are embodied in the phrase 
" before me." Any such rivalry would be 
an insult to Jehovah's majesty. It would be 
like introducing a usurper into the king's 
throne-room and there offering him alle- 
giance. It would be a tacit declaration that 
Jehovah was not competent to govern his 
creation alone, but must give over some of 
his provinces to others who would man- 
age their affairs, and thus relieve him. Of 
course this embraces in its condemnation 
both the. polytheism of paganism and the 
semi-polytheism of Romanism, but its main 
and primary charge has relation to the gen- 
eral abandonment of Jehovah by the human 
heart. 

Two thoughts here suggest themselves : 



26 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



L All want of a positive allegiance to Je- 
hovah is a positive allegiance to another Elo- 
him or supreme God. 

A self-reliant man, in the strict sense of 
the word, never vet existed. Man's nature 
is such that he looks without him for sup- 
port, as the ivy feels for the tree or the wall. 
We use the phrase u a self-reliant man" of 
one who stands independent of his fellow- 
man, but he is not independent of some 
outer prop. He has a god. If he had not, 
he would be himself a god. If he has 
not the true and living" God as his stay, then 
he is an idolater. Because he has no out- 
ward idol, no painted or sculptured work of 
art before which he bows, his idolatry is 
probably the more inveterate, because the 
more hidden and deceptive, unperceived by 
himself. He follows his master, he concen- 
trates his energies in his service, and is yet 
ready to deny the obvious relation which 
'these facts imply. It is this gross deception 
which is hiding the precipice from many a 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 



27 



careless soul. Some of my readers, it may 
be, are wrapt in this mist, supposing that 
Jehovah is their God, but forgetting that 
" covetousness is idolatry." 

God's will concerning you, his purpose 
in regard to his own eternal kingdom, his 
word, his Church, his love, — these were never 
known to you as objects of desire or motives 
of action. You have lived a score or scores 
of years upon this earth, and yet never 
inquired, " What are the commands of God 
who put me here ?" Have you been idle ? 
Have you been asleep ? By no means. 
You have been active and wide awake every 
day. In your business or profession you 
have worked with a will. You have there- 
fore had motives, for man cannot work with- 
out motives, and you have had a supreme 
motive, for one motive must in practice con- 
trol all others, for all action is the result of 
the dominant motive that has either crushed 
the others or brought them along: in its 
train. Now, has a regard for God been 



28 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



your dominant motive, or even any one of 
your motives, as you formed your plans or 
proceeded to their execution ? 

You have no hesitation in answering my 
question. God has not been in all your 
thoughts — that is, as a power. You have 
had an intellectual apprehension of the true 
God — you have even, at times, been agitated 
in your emotional nature with the idea of 
the Almighty ; but this intelligence and 
transient sensation have not had to do with 
the working-force of your being. Yet you 
have had a supreme motive. What, then, 
has it been ? Was it the desire for wealth ? 
or for rank or position ? or for social appre- 
ciation ? or for intellectual greatness ? or for 
worldly ease and pleasure? Whichever it 
was, here is your god, your Elohim, the 
governor and guide of your life, to which 
the real homage of your heart is given. 
You lean upon it as your ultimate good. 
Your life is arranged with a single view to 
its attainment. You measure everything 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 29 

by this standard. You have been so accus- 
tomed to this for years that you are perhaps 
yourself unconscious of the processes of 
your devotion. You do not stop to analyze 
the motives of an activity that has almost 
become an instinct. But now I ask you 
honestly to consider whether this be not 
your god, by no figure of speech, but in 
plainest reality. What worship could you 
render more devout than that of your affec- 
tions ? Surely the mere outward kneeling 
and oral praying do not form the soul of 
worship. They are the mere dress of a 
true homage. We know well that in the 
high spiritual sense in which all these things 
are to be regarded by immortal spirits, and 
in which they are regarded by the infinite 
God, the heart in its attachments forms the 
real life, the actual worship, of the man. 
That heart of yours has no attachment to 
the true and living God, and yet it has its 
attachment, its controlling attachment ; it 
could not live a moment without one. 



30 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



Now, special pleading aside, is it not clear 
that you are deliberately breaking the first 
and root commandment of God's written 
law, "Thou shalt have no other god before 
me"? Have you not another god, just as 
truly in the estimation of all spiritual intel- 
ligences as if you kneeled daily to a statue 
of Jupiter or Baal in your parlor ? All those 
applications for wisdom and help, all those 
ascriptions of gladness and gratitude, all 
those movements of regard and considera- 
tion which belong to your almighty Creator 
and Benefactor, are bestowed elsewhere, 
and whither they go, there is your god. 
Your whole being gravitates directly away 
from the true God by this positive action 
of your will and affections. 

As test questions of this condition of your 
being, let me offer you these. Use them 
candidly, and see where their consideration 
brings you : 

i. Have I ever loved God's word and 
made it my counselor ? 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



51 



2. Have I found prayer to Gocl a relief 
and source of strength? 

3. Have I identified myself with God's 
people ? 

4. Have I dwelt hopefully upon the bless- 
ings provided in God's heavenly and eternal 
kingdom ? 

5. Has my heart been grieved that I did 
not love and serve my God better ? 

These questions probe your heart. You 
cannot say " Yes " to any one of them. The 
conclusion your intellect can appreciate, 
though not your heart — that God is not your 
God, and hence that you are an idolater. 

In the quiet hours of the Sabbath, given 
to you for just such opportunities, deal 
faithfully with yourself and ponder on all 
these things. Look at the past and at the 
future. Think of what you have been, and 
what you ought to be. Consider alike the 
reproach and the peril of a position aloof 
from God while in the midst of God's uni- 
verse, with every pulsation of your being 



32 



THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



his gift, and surrounded by the appeals of 
his infinite love. In your retirement meet 
the question fairly ; throw aside all meta- 
physical subtleties about destiny and nature, 
and say out boldly what you know : " I have 
rejected God — I have chosen other gods — 
I have acted as independently and deliber- 
ately as if I were the sole being in the uni- 
verse ; I wish to follow other gods than 
Jehovah. I love these other gods ; they 
please and excite me, and in this excite- 
ment I lose sight of all those unpleasant 
questions about eternity and righteousness 
and justice which are so hateful to my soul. ,, 

Ah, when you say all that truth plainly 
to yourself, will you not shudder at the posi- 
tion it reveals ? In this path of honest 
dealing with yourself is your only safety. 

II. All allegiance to God that does not rec- 
ognize him as he has revealed himself is 
allegiance to a false god. 

God has shown himself to us, we may 
say, in the face of outward nature and in 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 33 



the inward nature of our minds. But both 
these natural sources have been corrupted. 
Sin has so disarranged our faculties as to 
make our contemplation both of the mate- 
rial and the spiritual creation very defective 
and deformed. All sorts of conflicting the- 
ories have grown up to deceive the mind 
and ruin the heart from these injured germs. 
As pure and sinless, we should have seen 
truth reflected both from our own souls 
and from every hill and valley of our earth. 
Each thought would have been a revela- 
tion, and each star a shining wisdom. But 
wrecked as we are by sin, these means are 
no longer effective. We have gone off and 
learned to speak a barbarous tongue, and 
the language of God's creation we cannot 
understand. A new revelation — a revelation 
to sinners — must be made, as God's love 
yearns to call us back to salvation and holi- 
ness, and this revelation is made in the 
written word. Here the goodness of the 

sin-pardoning God is disclosed ; nature 

3 



34 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

could never have taught that Here the 
sympathy and atonement of God as man 
are discovered ; nature could never have 
taught that In short, here, and here only, 
is the way back to God and purity and bliss 
revealed for us wandering and lost sinners. 
Now, the only true idea of God can be 
found in this heavenly record. The gospel 
view of God is of one who is infinitely 
holy and just, and who cannot regard sin 
(" of purer eyes than to behold evil and 
canst not look on iniquity"), and yet who 
can be just while he justifies the sinner who 
believes in Jesus. 

The gospel view of God represents him 
as in covenant with all such believers (and 
with none else), giving them his full pardon, 
and implanting in them a true holiness. To 
them he is Jehovah, the covenant-making 
and covenant-keeping God, and Jesus is the 
mediator of this covenant. Jesus is our 
peace and righteousness. Through his 
sacrifice in our behalf, justice no longer 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 35 



threatens us, and holiness visits our souls ; 
and this wonderful change, from condemned 
sinners to honored saints, results altogether 
from our union with Jesus by faith and love. 
Eternal joy at God's right hand awaits those 
who are thus united, forgiven and sanctified. 
This is God as he has revealed himself. 
This is Jehovah, the God of his own dear 
people. Now, any idea of God as the uni- 
versal Father (an idea founded on natural 
theology and human wishes), who regards 
all his creatures alike and will treat them all 
alike, and will see to it that they all alike 
reach eternal glory, — any such idea is for- 
eign and opposed to this revelation, and any 
such god is a false god. 

So a view of God as careless of personal 
holiness in his creatures or as too exalted to 
notice all their minute acts and thoughts, or 
as tyrannical and arbitrary in his dealings 
with them, or as appeasable by self-denials 
and penances, is a view of a false god, and 
not a view of Jehovah, the only living and 



36 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

true God. And the man who, despising or 
neglecting the Holy Scriptures, and trusting 
to his reason or his dreams or to nature 
or to nothing, holds such a god before his 
mind, is an idolater; he has put another 
Elohim before Jehovah Elohim. Because 
the thought of the divine Being which he 
thus introduces into his heart becomes the 
substitute for the true motion that should 
guide his life, he puts the helm into as 
false hands as if he had delivered it to 
Mammon. In truth, it will be found that 
this false god is only an image made up in 
the interests of Mammon and his train, and 
representing their demands upon the affec- 
tions. The true God is shorn of all his 
glorious attributes in order that sin may be 
practiced, and thus is not the true God at 
all, and the soul flatters itself it is worship- 
ing the true God, when it. has enshrined 
worldliness. 

In view of the tw r o thoughts we have thus 
noted — (i) that God must have a positive 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 



37 



allegiance, and (2) that it must be yielded to 
God as he has revealed himself, several sub- 
ordinate thoughts naturally follow. 

1. The help of the true God, Jehovah- 
Jesus, should be sought by us to overthrow 
our false gods. By that very act we should 
offer our rightful allegiance, and, in so doing, 
consecrate our life to the rightful service 
of Him who is our rightful king. We can 
never make head against our carnal gods 
by ourselves. They are too much like us, 
and we are too much like them, for any 
honest, persistent and successful opposition 
on our part. Just here Jehovah's help comes 
in. Introduce his ark, and Dagon will fall 
down and be shattered. The Almighty, who 
says, " Thou shalt have no other gods before 
me," says also to his Israel, who asks to be 
delivered from strange gods, " Against all 
the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment." 
It is to him you must cry as your conscience 
tells you and warns you of your folly in 
worshiping worldly gods. 



38 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

" I am weak, but thou art mighty ; 
Guide me by thy powerful hand." 

He will wrest our gods from us, and will 
pluck us from our gods, even if it cause 
pain ; and if we are honest in asking his 
help, we shall be willing to endure the pain 
for the truth, the peace, the honor and the 
glory of serving the living and tru.e God. 
Then to him I urge you, who have thus far 
followed other guides than Jehovah — to 
him I urge you to apply before opportu- 
nity is lost, and you and your gods find a 
common destruction. 

. 2. How watchful we should be in this earth, 
where the false gods are not only plenty, but 
exactly after the fashion of our own depraved 
hearts ! It was said of Athens that at each 
corner there was a new god, and some have 
even said that in population Athens had 
more gods than men. It is so with our un- 
seen gods of the unregenerate heart. They 
abound with different names and different 
characters, according to the tastes and cha- 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 



39 



racters of different men. In this way there 
are actually more of these gods than of 
men. But there is only one Jehovah, and 
his character is unalterable. He cannot 
accommodate his perfections to the varied 
and depraved tastes of men. His purity is 
wholly contrary to their condition and aims. 
The heart is not, therefore, going to gravi- 
tate naturally into piety. It is not going to 
quit its dear earthly gods and fall before 
Jehovah in reverence and affection as a 
matter of course. It must arise to arms ; it 
must assume its attitude of warfare ; it must 
act as sentinel as well as combatant. It 
must suspect everything earthly as a seduc- 
tion to sin, and only be satisfied when it has 
probed it with the sword of the Spirit, which 
is the word of God. 

3. The word of God ought to be in our 
hands all the while. This is the only offen- 
sive weapon against our false gods. With 
it we can cut them to pieces, hip and thigh. 
The Scripture enlightens and purifies us. 



40 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

To be sanctified though his word of truth 
is what Christ desires for his dear people. 
How we are rebuked by this thought! The 
Bible's collected dust testifies against us. 
The sword of the Spirit is covered with 
rust. We must love the word more, and 
to do this we must know it more and use 
it more. So only shall we be guiltless in 
regard to the first commandment of the law. 



The Second Commandment. 



" Thou ska It not make unto thee any graven image, or any 
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the 
ea7'th beneath, or that is in the water under the eai'th : thou 
shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them : for I the 
Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the 
fathers upon the children tinto the third and fourth generation 
of them that hate me; and showing mercy tmto thoi^sands of 
them that love me, atid keep my commandments " — Exodus xx. 



HE first commandment, as we have 



X seen, is the prohibition of any su-, 
preme object of affection and reverence in 
the heart but Jehovah, or any dependence 
for the guidance of life other than on him. 
The second commandment has regard to 
one specific form of withdrawing the heart's 
allegiance from Jehovah — a form which has 
been most successful in its sad results, and 
which has seduced the vast majority of our 



4-6. 




41 



42 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



race from the service of the true God. The 
first commandment forbids an inward, the 
second forbids an outward, idolatry. 

We are not well situated to understand 
the fascinations of image- worship. Our 
peculiar type of civilization, largely moulded 
by a pure and spiritual Christianity, has in 
it a prejudice against the grossness of a 
p-od of stone or metal which renders the 

o 

history of idolatry almost unintelligible. 
We are slow to imagine that a sensible 
man — a man of ordinary human w T isdom — 
could bow down and pray to a sculptured 
deity ; and yet we are met by the stubborn 
fact that the wisest of men (as far as human 
wisdom went) paid this adoring homage to 
the gods of Greece and Rome. It is not 
the tattooed savage and the degraded can- 
nibal who monopolize this worship, but the 
poets, the philosophers, the statesmen, of 
the chosen land of art and science herein 
showed their kinsmanship to the Maories 
and the Feejees. 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 43 



With all the careful training of the Jewish 
people, and although they were especially 
warned against this form of error, sin and 
ruin, they were charmed into its embrace, 
and filled the holy land with Baalim and 
Ashteroth, the male and female gods of 
the neighboring kingdoms. Solomon, their 
wisest king and wisest man, set the ex- 
ample, and the whole nation eagerly fol- 
lowed it. Against this most fatal style of 
sin the prophets inveighed with faithful 
vehemence ; and for this supreme iniquity 
of the land, the nation was dragged behind 
the triumphal cars of Assyria and Babylon. 

Let us hear Jeremiah as an example of 
the warning voices of the prophets : 

" Hear ye the word of the Lord, O kings 
of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus 
saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, 
* Behold ! I will bring evil upon this place, 
the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall 
tingle. Because they have forsaken me, and 
have estranged this place, and have burned 



44 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



incense in it unto other gods, whom neither 
they nor their fathers have known, nor the 
kings of Judah, and have filled this place 
with the blood of innocents ; they have built 
also the high places of Baal, to burn their 
sons with fire for burnt-offerings unto Baal 
(which I commanded not, nor spake it, 
neither came it into my mind) : Therefore, 
behold ! the days come/ saith the Lord, 
' that this place shall no more be called 
Tophet, nor the Valley of the sons of Hin- 
nom, but the Valley of Slaughter; and I 
will make void the counsel of Judah and 
Jerusalem in this place, . . . and I will make 
this city desolate, and a hissing/ " Jer. xix. 
3-3. 

Such was the prevalence of open idola- 
try, and such its punishment, in the most 
spiritually - enlightened people upon the 
earth. 

It is very true that the clearer light of 
Christianity has reduced the power of this 
gross form of falsehood, and yet human 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 45 

nature has unmistakably asserted its de- 
pravity in this direction even in the midst 
of the nominal Church of Christ. Before 
the fourth century after Christ was com- 
pleted, images of our Saviour were intro- 
duced into the churches, and these paved 
the way for introducing images of the saints, 
so that, by the eighth century, the Christian 
churches were as full of statues as ever were 
the heathen temples ; and before these mar- 
ble saints the illiterate bowed in prayer and 
vow, and knew no other god but these. The 
object at first was, doubtless, to help the 
imagination to worship the true God through 
a visible symbol ; and as Christ was God 
manifest in the flesh, it seemed perfectly 
proper to make a visible representation of 
Christ as a quickener of devotion. The 
very visibility and tangibility of the repre- 
sentation was a satisfaction to the worship- 
er ; and this, together with the greater 
external ceremony that could be thrown 
around an image- worship, formed the bait 



46 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



to the gross idolatry of the mediaeval Church 
and the Roman Church of to-day. 

The all-wise and omniscient God knew 
man's frailty, and in this second command- 
ment forbade the use in worship of any 
visible representation, even though it be 
of the divine Being himself in the person 
of Jesus Christ: "Thou shalt not make 
unto thee any likeness of anything that is 
in heaven above;" and the full expression of 
the context shows that the spiritual as well 
as the physical heaven is meant, the whole 
universe of God being included. 

I need hardly stop to say that the use of 
two distinct sentences for one, where the 
latter qualifies the former, is a common 
Hebraism. We are not forbidden to make 
images, but to make them in order to bow 
down to them, or to bow down to them 
when made. 

The only point at which this command- 
ment touches us Protestant Christians is in 
our general tendency to rest in form rather 



THE SECOXD COMMANDMENT. 47 



than in spirit, and to place religion in the 
emotions rather than in the affections. This 
is a human frailty ; and so long as we are 
human, we shall be open to the temptation. 
It has been suggested by prominent Protest- 
ants in this country that likenesses of dis- 
tinguished Christian heroes should be placed 
in our churches, and we find everywhere in 
Europe that the Protestant churches are 
adorned with crucifixes, images of our 
Saviour on the cross, whose direct tend- 
ency is to beget an image-worship. Even 
the cross itself, if we use it in worship to 
bow down to it, is forbidden by this com- 
mandment ; but the cross may be, and often 
is, used as a mere symbol of religious faith, 
where the crucifix would inevitably become 
an object of adoration. 

The reason God gives for his command 
against idolatry needs our attention. It is 
that he is a jealous God (El-kanna — Skoz 
^Icottj^). This expression is frequently used 
in the Old Testament, and in one place the 



48 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



Lord declared to Moses that his name is 
jealous. The force of the phrase is perhaps 
best seen in the words of Moses to Israel 
when he gave them his parting advice, " for 
the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even 
a jealous God" (Deut. iv. 24), a passage 
which is quoted and used by the apostle 
Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where 
he is speaking of the future and eternal 
judgments of the Almighty. We must free 
the idea from the attachments which we give 
it from our view of human jealousy. There 
is no selfishness, no envy, no hatred, in God's 
jealousy. It is the abundant outflow of his 
holiness, which, by its own virtue, must 
either assimilate or destroy everything in 
the universe. It envelops in its grace, or 
it drives forth from its purity and from all 
the blessings which accompany its purity. 
When we say that God is a jealous God, 
we say that he is no passive Brahm, like the 
god of the Hindoos, but that he glows with 
zeal for all that is pure and good and holy 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 



49 



and true, and is ever engaged actively in 
separating the holy and true from the un- 
holy and false, striving to do it first by 
mercy, but if man makes that fail, then by 
the cutting off of his judgments. This 
character of God is especially alluded to 
in this second commandment, because this 
form of sin appeared the most seductive 
and the most obstinate. It were well, there- 
fore, that God's character toward sin should 
here be especially exhibited. 

The remainder of the commandment is 
really an enlargement on this character ot 
holy jealousy, and the words startle us as 
we read them : " Visiting the iniquity of 
the fathers upon the children unto the third 
and fourth generation of them that hate me, 
and showing mercy unto thousands of them 
that love me and keep my commandments." 
" Is not this rank injustice, that children 
should be punished for their fathers' faults ?" 
it is objected. "Am I to be sent to hell 
because my great-grandfather sinned ?" It 

4 



SO THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

is very true that the human reason instinct- 
ively revolts at such a thought, and our 
unbiased instincts of the reason are cren- 
erally correct. Our affections are depraved, 
warped and sinful, but our notion of right 
and wrong remains in its general force, 
even though we may be too ignorant to 
know all its detailed applications. It is at 
this very bar of our own judgment that 
we shall be condemned if we continue en- 
emies to God. It is this comparatively 
healthful portion of our being, this which 
by its very nature cannot be essentially 
wicked or depraved, which exclaims against 
the punishment of children for parents' sins. 
And hence this portion of the second com- 
mandment is a stumbling-block to many. 
Besides the injustice of the thing, we see 
the fearful discouragement that it must 
generate in the soul against all attempts at 
return and reform. If I was condemned 
by my fathers sin before I was born, why 
should I make any endeavor after any- 



THE SECOND COMMAXDMENT. 



5* 



thing good ? It will be all a waste of time, 
a fostering, a delusion, an enlargement of 
disappointment. Now, all this exercise of 
mind in regard to God's description of him- 
self would be avoided if we read the Bible 
more carefully and compared Scripture with 
Scripture. God expressly addresses those 
who thus entirely misconstrue his dealings 
and his character, and speaks thus by his 
prophet Ezekiel : 

" What mean ye, that ye use this proverb 
concerning the land of Israel, saying, 'The 
fathers have eaten sour grapes and the chil- 
dren's teeth are set on edge ?' . . . Behold, 
all souls are mine ; as the soul of the father, 
so also the soul of the son is mine ; the soul 
that sinneth, it shall die. . . . Yet say ye, 
Why ? doeth not the son bear the iniquity 
of the father?" [misquoting this very com- 
mandment]. " When the son hath done that 
which is lawful and right, and hath kept all 
my statutes and hath done them, he shall 
surely live. The soul that sinneth, it shall 



52 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



die : the son shall not bear the iniquity of 
the father; . . . the righteousness of the 
righteous shall be upon him, and the wicked- 
ness of the wicked shall be upon him." 

What could more fully show the exact e 
justice of God and avert all objection to 
the misunderstood phrase in the second 
commandment ? The key to the difficulty 
is in the words, " of them that hate me" and 
the enunciation is just this— *that where a 
man is opposed to God, rejecting his truth 
and salvation, he endorses and supports, 
and thus becomes responsible for, the guilt 
of his ancestors. The stream of guilt runs 
down from father to son with accumulating 
force till it ends in its appropriate judgment. 
This judgment, so far as it is spiritual and 
eternal, falls on each sinner in the line, but 
so far as it is earthly and temporal, it falls 
on him who brings the sinfulness to the top 
of the climax — who adds the last drop to 
the fullness of the cup. This is only true 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. S3 



where the son or descendant is a hater of 
God. 

Hence we see the meaning of such pas- 
sages of revelation as these : in Job, where 
the patriarch speaks of the wicked, he says, 
" God layeth up his iniquity for his children." 
Isaiah says of Babylon : " Prepare slaugh- 
ter for his children for the iniquity of their 
fathers," and again to the Jews : " I will 
recompense. y . your iniquities and the in- 
iquities of your fathers together." So our 
Saviour, in pronouncing the fearful doom 
of the generation of ungodly and rebellious 
Jews among whom he lived, adds : " That 
upon you may come all the righteous blood 
shed upon the earth, from the blood of right- 
eous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son 
of Barachias, whom ye slew between the 
temple and the altar. Verily I say unto 
you, All these things shall come upon this 
generation." 

This is the natural flow and consequence 
of sin, but grace can furnish a check, and 



54 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

roll back the tide, both in relation to the 
physical and spiritual results of iniquity. 
Hence, even of wicked Ahab, the willing 
instrument of his wife Jezebel's idolatries 
and cruelties, it is recorded, "And it came 
to pass, when Ahab heard these words 
[of the prophet Elijah], that he rent his 
clothes and put sackcloth upon his flesh and 
fasted and lay in sackcloth and went softly. 
And the word of the Lord came to Elijah, 
the Tishbite, saying, ' Seest thou how Ahab 
humbleth himself before me ? Because he 
humbleth himself before me, I will not bring 
the evil in his days, but in his son's days 
will I bring the evil upon his house.' " So, 
also, the cry of the Psalmist is founded on 
this power of grace to check and cancel the 
issues of hereditary sin : "Oh remember not 
against us former iniquities," or, as the mar- 
gin reads it, " Remember not against us the 
iniquities of them that were before us "- — 
i. e. } our forefathers. 

The subject is thus freed from all ideas 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 55 

of injustice, for each one suffers for his own 
sin, made his own by appropriating it as 
an inheritance, and building on it, as on a 
foundation, his new sinfulness. Yet there 
is a mystery in this matter of the relation 
of paternity and sonship, in which we are 
simply to take God's word for it, recognize 
a corroborating analogy, and leave the rest 
for solution in a world of greater light and 
larger views. God's word shows clearly 
that there is a spiritual connection by blood 
descent. Every man begins where his father 
leaves off. If his father be evil, he starts 
with that amount of evil capital to use if he 
will, and if he be evil himself (as every man 
by nature is), then he actually uses that capi- 
tal in his own practice of evil. If his father 
be good, then he starts with that amount 
of good capital to use if he will, though, 
on this side of the picture, every man's in- 
nate depravity modifies the correspondence. 
Hence men accumulate evil from genera- 
tion to generation, but they do not accumu- 



56 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

late good. All they can do is to check the 
evil, and hand down the example and pre- 
cept for checking it to their posterity. It is 
for this reason, in this second command- 
ment, we find that the iniquity of the fathers 
is visited upon the children, but the good of 
the fathers is not so visited. 

The analogy to this fact of revelation we 
have in the matter of disease. Consumption, 
scrofula, and a thousand diseases, descend 
from parent to child. As these are purely 
physical, they do not involve necessarily the 

i 

idea of punishment. They may be used by 
God as the richest blessings to the soul to 
all eternity, and we know that they are con- 
stantly so used. No man can call it an 
injustice, therefore, that he should have a 
diseased body because his father was a 
drunkard, because his diseased body is a 
blessing, if he only have a mind to make it 
so. God comes personally to every man 
(in his love for every creature he has made), 
and offers to make everything in him and 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 



57 



around him to work together for his good. 
If man rejects this offer, and so lets his 
inherited disease be only a curse to him, let 
him not blame God for punishing the son 
for the father's sin. The son has chosen the 
punishment, of his free will. Even when, 
through grace, the infliction of the heredi- 
tary disease is made a blessing, there will be 
much temporary discomfort and pain ; and 
so in the soul where sin is pardoned and the 
Spirit given, there will be habits and tend- 
encies, much of the foul growth of heredi- 
tary sin, to cause temporary discomfort and 
pain. In neither case is it punishment, but 
affliction, which a parent can bring upon a 
child, even as you may bring affliction upon 
your neighbor by breaking his arm, he not 
at all consenting ; and there is no more 
divine injustice in the one than in the other. 
Two thoughts naturally suggest themselves 
from this subject brought before us in the 
second commandment: 

ist. What a vast responsibility rests upon 



58 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

parents! The parent has it in his power 
to inflict life-long evil upon his child, and to 
increase the child's everlasting condemna- 
tion, unless the grace of God interfere. As 
a father by his debauched life, or even by a 
life simply careless of the laws of health, 
may entail disease upon his children — and 
he is just as responsible for injuring his 
children as if he had put the cup of poison 
to their lips — so a father may, by his dis- 
regard of the laws of God, entail spiritual 
disease and misery upon his children, and 
he is just as responsible for his children's 
ruin as was Satan responsible for Adam's 
fall. 

Listen, then, ye that bend your souls 
to Mammon, thinking, dreaming, planning 
and wishing only about money, and ye 
that yield your talents and time to Fashion, 
feeding your poor starved souls on the frip- 
pery and flippancy of her fool's paradise — 
ye are not slaying yourselves, but your 
children, and preparing their hell of re- 



THE SECOXD COMMANDMENT. $g 

morse ! For your children's sake, if not for 
your own, stop, and seize the saving hand 
of Christ! 

2d. See the fullness of God? s grace : "And 
showing mercy unto thousands of them that 
love me and keep my commandments." 
Where the look of love and faith is put 
forth to Jesus, the whole condemnation, 
growing from ancestral sins, is stayed. And 
God is ever watching for the first accept- 
ance of his proffered grace, that its victory 
may be made perfect. He will not, he can- 
not, compromise and compound with sin. 
It must go on in its lava torrent of corrup- 
tion from generation to generation, sweep- 
ing everything before it into eternal despair, 
except the one divine rescue, not by com- 
promise, but by substitution and atonement, 
be accepted. Wherever the soul takes Christ 
as its portion, God's holy jealousy burns no 
more against the sinner — the deliverance is 
immediate and complete. The love of Jesus 
is the pledge of the deliverance. Do I love 



6o THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



to keep God's commandments ? Then I 
love God ; and if I love God, this is a clear 
sign that his Spirit is given me, and I am 
rescued from the long hereditary flood of 
guilt. Out of Christy I was appropriating 
generations of iniquity and earning their 
doom. In Christ, I am appropriating his 
eternal life and glorious reward. The ques- 
tion to each of us is between accumulated 
and accumulating guilt, and God's free, full 
grace in Christ. 



The Third Commandment. 



" Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain : 
for the Lord mill not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in 
vain." — Exodus xx. 7. 

THIS commandment holds its appropri- 
ate place in a regular gradation from 
the first. The first forbids the disregard of 
God in the heart, the second, such disregard 
in the outward act of worship, and this third 
(in its primary application), such disregard 
in the words of the mouth. God is to reign 
supreme in the heart, to be exclusive in his 
worship and to be mentioned always with 
reverence by the lips. The same holy jeal- 
ousy which burns against the false wor- 
shiper for the same reason burns against 
the reckless speaker, where the subject of 
speech is the almighty and infinite Jehovah. 

61 



62 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



Where there is a want of reverence there 
is a want of allegiance. So far forth as a 
subject is disrespectful, he is rebellious ; and 
all true government, especially the pure and 
holy government of God, must take cog- 
nizance of the rebellion in accordance with 
holiness and truth. 

The illustration of this principle in the 
family is very apt. The boy who has 
learned to speak of his father with dis- 
respect has learned to be disobedient, and 
so shows himself a violator of the root-law 
of family order and prosperity. Much of 
the filial ingratitude, undutiful neglect and 
rebellious independence of sons, over which 
so many fathers spend their vain sighs, 
would have been averted, if parents had 
recognized the two facts that implicit obe- 
dience is the absolute requisite of all true 
government, the keystone of moral order 
and strength, and that disobedience begins 
with the impudent and reckless word. The 
Christian parent should reverently imitate 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 63 



his heavenly Father, and not allow a single 
utterance of angry defiance or mocking jeer 
or careless disrespect from his child, but 
hold him guilty of a grievous sin. 

With regard to this third commandment, 
the common view of its exclusive reference 
to vulgar profanity is entirely too contracted. 
That this low and vulgar sin is included in 
the prohibition is very evident ; but were this 
its only meaning, the command w r ould have 
no application to any one of respectable 
social standing. Simple refinement would 
raise a person above the infringement of 
this commandment. An examination of 
two expressions in the passage will open to 
us, I think, a wider horizon, and bring the 
commandment, in its personal and practical 
application, nearer home. 

The first expression to which I refer is, 
"the name of the Lord thy God," or strictly, 
"the name of Jehovah thy God." The 
name of the Lord is not, on one hand, the 
mere articulate sound by which the mouth 



64 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



expresses the idea of Deity, nor is the 
phrase, on the other hand, a simple syn- 
onym for God. Scripture does not by this 
formula denote" "the title of God,'* separat- 
ing between God and his title., nor does it 
use a circumlocution and denote God him- 
self, making "the Lord" and "the name of 
the Lord " equivalents, but it holds up God 
in his special character of JcJio'jciJl the 
caoenant-making and covenant-keeping God 
of his own dear people, u The name of 
Jehovah'' means God, known and served 
under his revealed aspect of mercy, God 
appreciated as the pardoner of sin and 
giver of the spirit, the Jehovah or keeper 
of his precious promises to his people. For 
example, of the antediluvian piety it is said, 
" Then began men to call upon the name of 
the Lord" — i.e., it was then that distinctive 
recognition was made of God's special pro- 
vision of mercy for sinners. His name of 
Jehovah was received as indicating his rela- 
tion to his believing people. A name is an 



THE THIRD COMMAXDMEXT. 



65 



expression of the personal substance, an 
exhibition of the essential character. God's 
name bv which he delights to be known 
among men, is Love. He also says that his 
name is Jealous, but it is his name " Jeho- 
vah " which attaches him to his people, and 
which asserts his love and grace. His cha- 
racter of compassion is especially displayed 
in his word, and hence the Psalmist says, 
"Thou hast magnified thy word above all 
thy name" — that is, of all revelations of 
God's character, all expressions of his being, 
the written word is most full and complete. 
Here is the way of pardon and acceptance 
clearly portrayed. 

Another conspicuous display of God's 
character, but only local and temporary in 
its personal contact, while universal in its 
possible application, is in the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and so Jesus is in a high sense " the 
name of Jehovah," and he calls himself this. 
You remember how, just before his last 

sufferings and death, he cried unto the 

5 



66 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



Father, fl Father, glorify thy name," when 
he had said, just before, that it was himself, 
the Son of man, who should be glorified. 
Jesus was the name of God, or, as Paul de- 
clares, " the brightness of God's glory and 
the express image of his substance ;" and 
we have no hesitation in seeing* this bright 
glory of Jesus in the burning bush, the fiery 
cloudy pillar and all the theophanies of 
Old-Testament days. The frequent refer- 
ence to the tabernacle or temple as the 
place which Jehovah had chosen to put his 
name there, asserts that the express image 
of Jehovah occupied that earthly habitation 
among his people. The name of Jehovah 
that was there placed was the zaord of God, 
who was in the beginning with God and who 
was God. The great Antitype was there 
present among his types. By the "name 
of Jehovah," then, we are to understand 
his manifestations to man, especially in his 
Scripture and in his Son, each of which is 
called, for a similar reason, "the Ward" 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT. 67 

The second expression to which our 
attention should be directed is the phrase, 
" to take in vain." The literal rendering is, 
" thou shalt not lift up the name of Jehovah 
thy God lightly. M Taking God's name in 
vain is not simply the using the divine 
name to support a falsehood, as some say 
who would make this commandment a pro- 
hibition of perjury, but it is also the use of 
that name in any cause or on any occasion 
where a due solemnity does not accompany 
the use. It is the flippant and thoughtless 
use of God's name. It is the taking up the 
name in the vacant, purposeless way in 
which we pluck off a leaf as we pass along 
the road — the use of the name, not only 
where the purpose is evil, but where there 
is no defined purpose at all. There need 
be no intention to mock or deride the holy 
name — and the thought of such mockery 
or derision may be quite abhorrent to the 
soul — yet there is a meddling with holy 
things by profane hands, and the careless 



68 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



perpetrator is therein a positive and active 
enemy to holiness and God. Again, there 
may be not only an absence of evil purpose, 
but, beyond an absence of all purpose, there 
may even be a purpose of good, but this 
purpose may be seized upon in so rash and 
ill-advised a way that the use of the divine 
name in it is a taking the name in vain, just 
as Uzzahfs touching the ark of God, even 
to stay it upon the cart and prevent its fall, 
was a sin of profanity, and called for the 
divine punishment. 

From these thoughts upon the two prin- 
cipal phrases in the third commandment, 
Ave are prepared to see its true scope, as 
bearing upon all use other than a devout 
and reverential use of all that expresses 
God's character and being, whether it be 
his verbal name, his written word, his only- 
begotten Son who has declared him, or any 
of the great truths which are brought to 
the heart and conscience by the Holy Spirit. 
Let us look a moment at each of these divi- 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



6 9 



sions of thought, and apply a faithful exami- 
nation to our own souls. 

1. In respect to God's verbal name, we 
are not to be satisfied with our freedom 
from the coarse profanity which culture and 
good-breeding forbid, but we are to remove 
the habit of using the holy name in ordi- 
nary conversation in which the use has no 
religious character. We are not to call a 
wretched and forlorn person or thing " God- 
forsaken, " or to hail a gift as a " God-send," 
when, in using these epithets, we have no 
design to use their full meaning, and there- 
fore have not the proper attitude of mind 
for their utterance. The use is both an in- 
sult to God and a debauchery to the soul. 

2. In respect to Gods written ivord, we 
are to take it up with reverence both in 
our hearts and on our tongues. Any other 
action toward the holy Bible is taking God's 
name in vain. A just view of this forbids 
our travesties of Scripture, or the burlesque 
use of language indissolubly associated with 



70 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

Scripture in our minds, all witticisms, by 
pun or conundrum, in relation to the sa- 
cred words of revelation, in short, anything 
which to our sinful natures would tend to 
debase or vulgarize the heavenly truths of 
the Bible through the laws of association. 
It also forbids all mere use of Scripture for 
its story and history, for its geography and 
science, for its language and literature. The 
use of its letter without its spirit is a dis- 
honor to God. The only way in which this 
exhibition of God is to be rightly used is 
in finding God therein. For that purpose 
he gave it, and a rejection of that use is an 
assertion of self before God. The Bible is 
given to show sinners the way of salvation 
and holiness, and, as before said, any other 
ultimate use of the divine Book is the tak- 
ing God's name in vain. 

But 3, and chiefly, in relation to Jesus 
and the great, eternal truths which the Holy 
Spirit introduces to the soul. To each man 
comes through his conscience a summons 

o 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT. 



71 



from God to give heed to his future spirit- 
ual and eternal condition. A sense of sin, 
and of unrest by reason of sin, oppresses 
every child of Adam, and God is known, 
even to the untutored soul, as a God of 
justice. His name of " Jealous" is daily 
seen and understood by the most ignorant 
and worldly, and it is to all such that he 
comes to reveal himself as " Love." He 
comes, in Jesus and his blood, to seek and 
save the lost. Christ, with his saving truth, 
is that name of Jehovah which was pro- 
claimed to Moses in the cleft of Sinai's 
rock, and which is now proclaimed, through 
Church and Christian and Bible, to every 
soul. 

" Jehovah, Jehovah God, merciful and 
gracious, long-suffering and abundant in 
goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thou- 
sands, forgiving iniqtdty and transgression 
and sin, and that will by no means clear the 
guilty ; visiting the iniqtdty of the fathers 
upon the children^ and upon the children s 



/ 2 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



children, unto the third and to the fourth 
generation!' 

This is the manifestation of Jesus, the 
Saviour, who saves, but not at the expense 
of justice, who saves without a compromise 
with iniquity, who lets sin wreak its fierce 
wrath, either on himself (and there is the 
sinner's salvation) or on the sinner (and 
there is the sinner's damnation), with the 
sinner's choice to decide which it shall be. 
This knowledge of God's active grace in 
Jesus is the possession of you who read 
these pages. " This is the true Light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world." This wonderful Jesus with his 
glorious truth is the name of God entrusted 
to your keeping. You have taken it up 
into your cognition and thought. How 
have you taken it up ? With admiration 
and gratitude and devotion ? Have you 
used it as a treasure from heaven, cherish- 
ing it in your bosom, and ready to part 
with all else rather than part with it? 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT. 



73 



Have you loved to learn more and more 
of God through his disclosed name, seeing 
the Father in Jesus, and studying intently 
and delightedly the divine glory that shines 
forth from the Son ? Have you felt that 
life's sunshine was in the smile of Christ, 
from whose gospel sprang all true halcyon 
days ? Have these been your experiences 
before the glad tidings ? Or have you met 
them with an averted front? Have you 
taken up this great name of Jehovah in 
vain ? Have you treated the message from 
heaven like a sonor to be forgotten ? Have 
you let it rest upon your ears and forbid- 
den it your heart, putting it in company 
with theories and fantasies, as of like 
weight and worthy of equal regard ? 

I do not ask you, Have you derided the 
gospel and its Author? — that you would be 
far from doing — but, Have you neglected the 
gospel — played with it, as a man may play 
with a glove while he is talking to a friend 
— used its priceless truths without attention 



74 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



and so without respect? If this is your 
record, be assured that God does not hold 
you guiltless. Such a precious treasure in 
your hand must be either a great blessing 
or a great curse to you. As a man is 
gifted from God, the possible extremes of 
his destiny widen. A brighter heaven and 
a darker hell unfold with every new boon. 
This gospel in your possession is a mighty 
responsibility ; and if you slight it, you are 
taking God's name in vain, and choosing 
the penalty rather than the reward. God 
gave you the gospel for a purpose — the 
purpose of glorifying him and glorifying 
your own soul ; you take it for another 
purpose or for no purpose. Can you have 
any doubt as to what the end of this oppo- 
sition will be? 

There is a parallel thought for the 
Christian who neglects the glorious name 
of Jehovah, the Christian who allows the 
gay and foolish world to wheedle him into 
its arms, who sinks down into a semi-legal- 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT. 



75 



ism, where duty is all hard work and the 
liberty of God's children appears very much 
like bondage. This Christian is really tri- 
fling with the gospel — he is taking God's 
name in vain. He has seen the grace of 
God in Christ and acknowledged it by faith, 
and now that eternal gospel, on whose per- 
petual flow depends his life, is slighted for 
the tinseled and bedizened rivals of an 
hour. The due and proper reverence of 
God's name implies a very honest and a 
very hearty searching of the Scriptures, it 
implies a sincere and ready use of prayer, 
and it implies a devotion of time, time, 
TIME, to the contemplation and worship 
of the Redeemer; and unless a Christian 
exhibits this style of piety, he is breaking 
the third commandment as truly as yon 
rough blasphemer in the street, at whose 
profanity he shrinks back in horror and 
disgust. The sin of each, when analyzed, 
is a disregard of the sanctity of God's 
manifestations and of their requirements, 



76 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



a worldly and profane posture of the soul 
toward the Teachings forth of God's grace ; 
and they only differ in this, that the one 
shows his neglect less openly to others, by 
negative rather than positive signs, while 
the other hangs out his flae, and with his 
words exposes the carelessness of his heart. 

It is a most solemn thought to us that 
the infinite God, the blessed and only Po- 
tentate, the Kino- of king-s and Lord of 
lords, who only hath immortality, dwelling 
in the light which no man can approach 
unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see, 
to whom belong honor and power everlast- 
ing brink's his name to us as a treasure 
and confides it to our care, saying, "Occupy 
till I come." The history of our eternity 
will beoin with our use or abuse of this 
keepsake. Its injury or neglect will tell 
fearfully against us in that day when our 
relation to this name will be seen to be the 
criterion of our salvation. Then will this 
Xame (as including every expression and 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT. 



77 



manifestation of God) be recognized both 
by exultant and despondent souls as " the 
brightness of his glory and the express 
image of his person," centering in the 
Lord Jesus Christ, whose holy rays must 
ever illuminate or ever consume. In this 
view, how vast is the import of the third 
commandment ! Xot one of us can remain 
unconcerned before the voice which rolls 
through the a?es from Sinai, and breaks 
to-day upon our ears, "Thou shalt not 
take the name of the Lord thv God in vain, 
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless 
that taketh his name in vain." 



The Fourth Commandment. 



" Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy. Six days shalt 
thou labor and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath 
of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, 
nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid- 
servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates : 
for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all 
that in them is, and rested the seventh day : wherefore the Lord 
blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed itP — Exodus xx. 8-1 1. 

THIS commandment holds a remarkable 
position in the Decalogue. It lies be- 
tween those which touch our duty to God 
and those which touch our duty to man. 
Before it are the three commandments 
which enjoin reverence for Jehovah in his 
essence and expression (an avoidance of a 
wrong expression, and the proper regard 
for the true), and after it are the six com- 
mandments which enjoin respect for the 

78 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 79 



rights and welfare of our fellow-men. Be- 
tween these two distinct departments of 
the Decalogue is found this commandment 
regarding the Sabbath — not a few paren- 
thetic words, but the longest and most mi- 
nute of all the commandments. 

The Sabbath is said to be the day of 
Jehovah — it is " the Sabbath of the Lord 
thy God " — and hence its law appropriately 
adjoins those which expose our duty to 
God ; but our Saviour also tells us that the 
Sabbath was made for man, and hence the 
Sabbath ordinance appropriately adjoins 
those which expose our duty to man. It 
belongs to both branches of the Decalogue. 
Its position tells us that a breach of the 
Sabbath is a direct insult to God, and is 
also a direct injury to man, weakening the 
power of a day which is eminently a blessing 
to the human race. 

This remarkable position of the Sabbath 
commandment is proof incontrovertible of 
its binding character for all men in all time. 



80 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

We have on a former occasion seen that 
the Decalogue has this universal applica- 
tion — that it was intended for no circum- 
scribed period or locality ; and here we find 
in that Decalogue — nay, in its very heart, 
occupying one-third of its bulk and most 
intimately interwoven with its texture — the 
divine order to sanctify the Sabbath-day. 
This is enough to satisfy any candid mind. 
We need not go farther and show that the 
Sabbath was expressly recognized by Israel 
before the Decalogue was given, at the time 
when the manna was first sent, and when on 
the sixth day the people collected sufficient 
food for two days that they might not pro- 
fane the Sabbath, where the narrative shows 
that it was a deep-rooted religious observ- 
ance. We need not refer to the division 
of time into the unnatural portions of 
seven days, as seen in the history of the 
world from the time of Noah to that of 
Moses, which so clearly proves the exist- 
ence of a Sabbath before the people of 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 8 1 



Israel had a being even in the person of 
their father and founder Abraham. It is 
sufficient to show the command of the Sab- 
bath engraven by the finger of God most 
conspicuously among the ten items of his 
great moral law, and placed in awful con- 
cealment within the holy ark as indicative 
of its peculiar sanctity, — I say, it is sufficient 
to see it in this company and these circum- 
stances to be assured of its important 
relation to every subject of the divine gov- 
ernment. 

There are two expressions in the com- 
mand itself which testify to this universality 
of application. 

i. "Remember the Sabbath-day." It is no 
new institution which you are now to learn 
about for the first, but it is an old observ- 
ance, not Israelitish, but human, Noachic 
and Adamic, which you, God's Israel, are 
to remember, that you may sustain it in its 
purity, just as you are to sustain a true and 
spiritual worship as against idolatry. This 

6 



52 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

is the purport of the phrase. Israel was 
selected and made the people of God by 
his grace, that in them, as in an ark, might 
be deposited and preserved the truths, 
moral and practical, which God had given 
the race. The chief advantage of Israel 
was that to them were committed the ora- 
cles of God. These oracles were not made 
for Israel, but Israel, as such, was made 
for them. In this ark — this early church — 
were preserved and concealed, by reason 
of man's depravity, the truths which would 
have been altogether corrupted and dissi- 
pated if left to man's ordinary care. This 
accounts for the word "remember" — 
" remember the Sabbath-day.^ 3 

2. The other expression which proves the 
universality of its application (in addition to 
its very position in the Decalogue) is the 
reason o-iven for the divine order — " because 
in six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, 
the sea and all that in them is, and rested 
the seventh day: wherefore Jehovah blessed 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 



83 



the Sabbath-day and hallowed it." The rea- 
son began at the creation, and therefore the 
observance began at the creation. Adam 
and Eve in Paradise kept the Sabbath-day ; 
for the reason for its observance, as here 
given in the law, was as cogent with them 
as it was with Israel at Sinai, or as it is 
with us to-day. 

I refer to this perpetual obligation of the 
Sabbath, because a flippant criticism and 
a naturalistic and rationalistic theology 
are endeavoring to persuade the Christian 
world that everything that was found in 
Israel was a mark of bondage from which 
we are happily free — an error which has 
just this ground of truth, that from the 
ceremonies of Israel we are expressly freed ; 
but the Sabbath was never an appurtenance 
of the Jewish ceremonial, any more than 
the worship of one God was, but both were 
requirements of God upon the race, and of 
course especially urged upon the Jews as 
representatives of the true religion. The 



8 4 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



Jews, as a typical Church, had much that 
was to be abrogated when the antitype 
should come ; but as a Church, they had 
much that was to remain w r herever and 
whenever the true Church of God was. 
The position of the Sabbath in the Deca- 
logue shows us to which of these two 
classes it belongs. 

The question in regard to the seventh and 
the first days of the week, as to which is 
the true SabSath, is one entirely apart from 
the question of Sabbath observance. A 
doubt as to the proper day cannot alter a 
conviction of the general duty of keeping 
a Sabbath. The Jew and the Seventh-day 
Baptist, if sincere, are equally Sabbath 
observers with others who keep the first 
day of the week. We all agree in the 
duty, although we differ on the minor point 
of the day. Our own observance of the 
first day is in accordance with the uniform 
usages of the apostles and of the apostolic 
Church, the day in which Jehovah-Jesus 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 



85 



rested from his work of the new creation 
being substituted for the day in which he 
rested from his work of the old creation. 
A change of day very appropriately marked 
a change of dispensation, while the observ- 
ance of a Sabbath in each marked the one- 
ness of the two dispensations in their essen- 
tial character. 

Leaving these questions, we proceed to 
consider the two chief thoughts in connec- 
tion with the command — first, What is the 
idea of the Sabbath ? and, secondly, What 
is its proper observance ? 

I. What is the idea of the Sabbath? It 
had its origin in God's resting on that day. 
Of course, this is an anthropomorphism, 
God is said to work and to rest, and the 
figure of a man working and resting is 
placed before our minds. The figure 
would not be given us unless there were 
in it the nearest approach to the incompre- 
hensible truth itself. It is true, though not 
the whole truth, and we can rest safely in it 



86 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



until we know God more fully. There was 
an actual rest with Gocl on the seventh day, 
whether that day was twenty-four hours or 
twenty-four thousand years long. The com- 
mandment further orders man to labor six 
days, and to do no work on the Sabbath. 
And again, the word " Sabbath" means 
" rest/' Most certainly, then, the great 
idea of the Sabbath is the idea of rest. 
This the apostle clearly indicates in his 
argument in the fourth chapter of his Epis- 
tle to the Hebrews., where he shows us that 
the Sabbath was a type of the great Sab- 
bath-rest of heaven in store for the saints 
of God ; for, he says, just as God rested 
from working on the seventh day, so the 
saints of God will rest from toil when they 
reach that Sabbatism. 

On this passage Moses Stuart remarks : 
" As God ceased from his work on the 
seventh day, and enjoyed holy delight in the 
contemplation of what he had done, so the 
believer, in a future world, will cease from 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 87 



all his toils and sufferings here and look 
back with holy delight on the struggles 
through which he has passed, and the la- 
bors which he has performed for the sake 
of the Christian cause." 

This idea of rest, involved in, and denoted 
by, the Sabbath, was further shown in the 
institution of the sabbatical year, which was 
a local and temporary ordinance among the 
Israelites. Its institution occurs in the midst 
of other civil and ceremonial laws given 
at Mount Sinai, and runs thus: "When 
ye come into the land which I give you, 
then shall the land keep a Sabbath unto the 
Lord. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, 
and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard 
and gather in the fruit thereof ; but in the 
seventh year shall be a Sabbath of rest unto 
the land: thou shalt neither sow thy field 
nor prune thy vineyard. That which 
groweth of its own accord of thy harvest 
thou shalt not reap, neither gather the 
grapes of thy vine undressed, for it is a 



88 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



year of rest unto the land/' Then it is 
beautifully added, "And the Sabbath of the 
land shall be meat for you." It is as if 
God said, " Do not grudge this loss of 
corn and wine, but remember in your self- 
denial, as regards them, that your spiritual 
nourishment is augmented by the year of 
rest, in the trial of your faith and in its typ- 
ical instruction so vividly brought before 
your souls." 

In the realization of a sabbatical rest we 
see a marked contrast with the time imme- 
diately preceding. There have been six 
days of active labor, and straightway the 
quiet of the Sabbath supervenes. There 
have been six busy years of sowing and 
reaping, and then follows without any grad- 
ual preparation the sabbatic year of agri- 
cultural repose. The transition is abrupt, 
and so most marked. Aqrain. we note that 
the observance of the rest is unnatural. 
Man would not stop his work on the 
seventh day, nor would an Israelite have 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 



8 9 



stayed his sowing and reaping in the 
seventh year except by direct command of 
God. On the contrary, it would appear to 
the natural man a waste of time and op- 
portunity in either case. Hence the ob- 
servance of a Sabbath is an act of faith — a 
faith which abruptly ceases from a natural 
sequence and makes an unnatural hiatus. 
It is true that physiologists have discovered 
that the Sabbath is most beneficent in its 
influences on health and physical life, but 
this is a discovery made by Christian in- 
vestigation, and not a natural motive for 
Sabbath-keeping. It is a token of the 
goodness and wisdom of God, who mingles 
our spiritual and temporal good in the same 
institution, but to man subjectively it would 
never be a practical argument for an exact 
seventh-day rest. 

Having thus seen that the idea of the 
Sabbath is that of a rest seized and e7itered 
upon by faith, we are prepared to take up 
the last and most important inquiry— 



90 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

II. What is its proper observance? My 
first remark is this, that the Jewish civil 
and ceremonial law can give its no hint 
as to its proper observance. A man found 
gathering sticks upon the Sabbath-day was 
put to death by stoning while Israel was 
still in the wilderness. This execution was 
in accordance with the civil laws of the Jews 
in regard to the observance of the Sabbath : 
" Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your 
habitations upon the Sabbath-day." This 
was the express order of the civil law. 
The man was gathering sticks for a fire, 
and thus virtually kindling a fire and break- 
ing the civil law, the penalty for which was 
death. This detailed form of Sabbath-keep- 
ing is no more binding onus in the present 
dispensation than is the command to abstain 
from the wearing of linsey-woolsey. Lev. 
xix. 19.* All these specific commands 
formed parts of that great typical teaching 

* " Neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come 
upon thee." 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 9 1 

which ended in our Saviour's advent. They 
then, by reason of the substance taking the 
place of the shadow, became, so far as the 
observance and use went, axoiyzm, " ele- 
ments " or u rudiments of the world," " weak 
and beggarly " — that is, very inefficient 
expositions of truth compared with the 
full gospel of Jesus. They thenceforward 
became illustrations, and lost their former 
province as first principles and guides of 
truth. We are, therefore, to mark the 
clear distinction of the general ordinance 
of the Sabbath, which was universal, for all 
men in all time and all lands, and the specif- 
ic laws of the Sabbath, which were partic- 
ular for Israelites in the time of their polity 
and the land of Canaan only. It is with 
such an understanding that we can rightly 
say that the Christian Sabbath is not the 
Jewish Sabbath. The mistake of the Pu- 
ritan Sabbath is in a lack of regard for this 
distinction, as if the internal police of the 
Jewish people before Sinai and in Palestine 



02 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



was to be copied by Anglo-Saxons in Mas- 
sachusetts and Connecticut. Again and 
again the apostles declare that the Christian 
Church is released from the bondage of 
the burdensome " touch not, taste not, ham 
die not" ordinances, and that Christians are 
brought directly in contact with the great 
spiritual truths which these ordinances ad- 
umbrated. But they add that we must not 
use our liberty from these detailed outward 
observances as an occasion for the flesh- 
that is, as an opportunity for our worldliness 
to have vent and spread itself. 

This leads me to my second remark, that 
the European Sabbath is a false Sabbath. 
In leaping forth from the strict externals 
of the Jewish Sabbath, Christians (so- 
called) in continental Europe have made 
the Sabbath a mere holiday, a day of gay- 
etv and light amusement ; in which, it is true, 
they abstain from their wonted labor in craft 
and trade, but utterly forgetting- that the 
Sabbath rest is a sacred rest — that not only 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT, 93 

are we to do no work, but also to keep the 
day holy. The Puritans ran into legalism, 
and these European Christians into license. 
They both have failed to understand the 
true spiritual character of the Sabbath. In 
opposition to both these extremes, we re- 
mark that the Sabbath is God's day. He 
has given it his own holy name. " The Sab- 
bath of the Lord thy God," he calls it in his 
commandment to the human race, spoken 
from Sinai, and the Holy Spirit calls it " the 
Lord's day'' in the New Testament. This 
fact shows us that its rightful observance 
must have regard to our ri^ht relation to 
God. The soul must be turned Godward. 
Worship becomes most appropriate, and 
with it the study of God's character and 
will as given us in the gospel of Jesus 
Christ. No Sabbath-keeping is a right 
observance that does not thus recognize 
the day as God's day, that does not bring 
the soul into the positive and active con- 
templation of God and his word. It is in 



94 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

this, and in this only, that the day is made 

holy. 

Let no one here suggest as an objection 
that the holiness of the Sabbath was a mere 
ceremonial holiness, a mere external dis- 
tinction. This is not so. When God ut- 
tered the order for the Sabbath from Sinai, 
there was no ceremonial in Israel, and hence 
110 ceremonial holiness. The word " holy " 
has its full original force — it refers to the 
heart of man and its humble recognition 
and acceptance of the divine ; and the 
keeping of the Sabbath holy can mean 
nothing else, Godward, but a fervent re- 
ligious regard of its hours as riven to draw 
the soul nearer to God. 

Here, again, notice that while the Sabbath 
is God's day, it is also "made for man" — 
not for man's frivolity and worldly indulgf- 
ence, any more than for man's free run in 
sin, but for man as man, as the image of 
God, as he was made and intended to be 
by his Creator. " The Sabbath was made 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 95 

for man," cries the licentious heart that 
keeps the Sabbath by breaking it. He 
forgets that he has lost his manhood and 
become a fool and a beast, and the Sabbath 
was not made for a fool or a beast, but for 
man. It was made to improve and exalt 
man, to further his highest interests, to 
foster in him the work of God's Spirit, to 
unworld him and inheaven him, and to do 
all this by giving his time, precious time, to 
abstract his attention from the cares and 
occupations of the ordinary life, and to 
fasten it upon the infinite interests of the 
spiritual and eternal life. If the Sabbath 
was given for anything lower than this, if it 
was given for the benefit of man's body or 
present life, why is it found amid the loftiest 
thoughts of God and the profound com- 
mands that search out man's heart and 
speak to his entire immorality ? Away 
with such trifling before the glorious words 
of Jehovah ! 

We see, then, from the two considera 



g6 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



tions, that the Sabbath is God's clay and 
that it is made for man, that it is to be by 
man spiritually observed for his spiritual 
good. This conclusion, carefully noted, 
does away with all riding, sailing, visiting, 
promenading, gaming, — in short, with all 
indulgence in mere amusements, however 
innocent in themselves and proper on other 
days ; and, on the other hand, it does away 
with all mere ritualism and formality/with 
all mere external strictness, and, indeed, 
with all strictness that is not properly and 
legitimately connected ivith spiritual growth. 
A forced asceticism is as repugnant to the 
truth as is a wild license — they are two 
forms of the same self-righteousness. The 
only external duty clearly commanded by 
God in the universal commandment of the 
Sabbath is abstinence from our usual occu- 
pations. Our labor and work are to be 
done in the six days, and abruptly given 
up on the Sabbath. That much was an 
absolute necessity to a true Sabbath-keep- 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 97 

ing, but, beyond that, the Bible, our only 
guide, tells us nothing. It shows us, in- 
deed, that Christians were accustomed to 
assemble upon the Christian Sabbath, which 
is a most natural prompting of the renewed 
heart. What more natural to such, upon a 
day wherein worldly work is omitted for 
spiritual purposes, than to come together 
in search for the spiritual gain ? This 
coming together may take any form — it 
may be a prayer-meeting, a conference- 
meeting, a Bible-meeting, an experience- 
meeting, or all combined, — there may be 
only one in the day or a dozen. In this 
there is the largest liberty. We must rid 
ourselves of the false notion that two 
stately meetings in a pulpited and pewed 
church are the true qualem and quantum 
of Sabbath duties, even so far as public 
meetings go. Often one warm prayer- 
meeting is worth them both. Bring Chris- 
tians together with Bible, prayer and song, 

and you have a true meeting of the Church, 
7 



98 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



complete in every part. Anything more 
than that is adventitious. There is a gen- 
eral rule, however, for God's people, which 
the Holy Spirit gives us, which we must 
apply to the Sabbath as to everything else 
— it is that everything be done decently 
and in order. There should be no un- 
becoming looseness and irregularity in out- 
ward observances ; that would be occasion 
of scoffing to the world, and an obstacle to 
our own true progress, as it would tempt 
us to frequent omissions and neglect, and 
all indifference toward public worship is a 
mark of low spirituality. Let a proper 
uniformity in our methods be observed, 
and let no rash and rude changes be 
made. Let the duties which we owe to the 
Church be fully and gladly performed. In 
this, as in everything, let not our liberty, our 
undoubted liberty, to choose our own way 
of keeping the Sabbath holy according to 
our conscience — I say, let not this liberty 
prove with any of us an occasion for the flesh. 

* 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 



99 



While we take this position from God's 
word on the positive side, we can on the 
negative side as certainly warn every one 
against allowing- the business of the week 
to encroach on the time and thoughts of the 
Sabbath. 

Christian merchant, do you make up your 
accounts on the Sabbath? Christian law- 
yer, do you study your case on the Sab- 
bath ? Christian woman, do you carry on 
your housekeeping or social employments 
upon the Sabbath? Christian youth, do 
you prepare your school-tasks upon the 
Sabbath ? If so, you are laboring and 
doing all your work on seven days, and 
not six, . and you are not keeping the 
Sabbath holy. The first necessity of the 
Sabbath — that is, your time and mind being 
free to study God and his word — this first 
necessity of the Sabbath you despise. You 
might as well take a shop upon the public 
thoroughfare, and keep it wide open for 
customers upon the Sabbath ; that would 



100 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



not be a whit worse treatment of God's 
command. Why have you not faith in the 
God of the Sabbath, that he will guard 
your interests, and not let you suffer from 
the observance of his day, as he guarded 
Israel, and provided for the support of a 
whole nation while the whole land kept a 
Sabbath-year? Your want of faith makes 
you a Sabbath-breaker, and your Sabbath- 
breaking is constantly weakening" your faith. 

The only occasions in which God permits 
his command to receive an apparent dis- 
obedience is when an absolute necessity or 
a pious activity makes the exception. The 
priests in the temple profaned the Sabbath. 
Thev were - obliged, bv the necessities of 
the law of God, to remove and change the 
show-bread, to snuff the candles and to 
perform the other service of the temple 
on the Sabbath-day. Our Lord taught that 
it was right to heal disease or relieve any 
case from pressing distress on the Sabbath. 
These exceptions are very easily discrimi- 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT, 10 1 



nated. Does the question of traveling on 
the Sabbath arise? or of using the street- 
car, or a hired carriage ? Let it be an- 
swered by no categoric universal " It is 
right/' or "It is wrong/' but let it be an- 
swered by each person on each occasion, 
" Does my piety prompt this ? or am I seek- 
ing my own pleasure and amusement?" If I 
am in a street-car upon the Sabbath, on an 
errand of piety, it is as well as if I were on 
my feet or in my bed. I am right, while 
another at my side, who is taking his ride 
for pleasure on his way to dine with a 
friend or on his way to the Central Park, 
is as certainly wrong. If everybody would 
act in regard to the Sabbath from this stand- 
point of personal piety, we should find no 
difficulty in practice. Let the directors of 
the public conveyances observe the same 
rule, and decide as to running their vehicles 
on the Sabbath, by the consideration, not 
what is gainful, but what is godly, and their 
decisions will be blessed of God. Each 



102 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

soul must be its own judge. My use of a 
public conveyance upon the Sabbath does 
not justify or endorse the. action of the 
directors in running it, nor does their action 
in running it justify or endorse my use of it. 
Each case is wholly independent of the 
other, and is to be judged by its motive. I 
cannot throw my sin on the directors, and 
they cannot throw their sin on me ; neither 
can my pious action benefit them, nor their 
pious action benefit me. 

The outer law of the Sabbath to the 
Christian is simply to abstain from the 
ordinary daily labor ; the inner law of the 
Sabbath is to keep it holy. Like all the 
other commandments, it is solely and in- 
tensely personal, and its keeping and 
breaking can only be known to one's own 
soul and to God, who seeth the heart. It 
has an external and visible part, as have 
the convocation of saints, and baptism, and 
the Lord's Supper, and the reading of the 
Word, but it also has its internal and in- 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 103 

visible part, which is its heart and marrow, 
and here the right observance of the Sab- 
bath must begin. Let us, then, give the 
Sabbath its full value to our souls by the 
especial and assiduous cultivation of our 
spiritual knowledge and affections on the 
holy day. Let us spend much of it in 
prayer and private meditation, in close and 
happy communion with Jesus, and the rest 
of it (in company with the same Jesus) in 
conversing with and teaching others of 
God's love in Christ. If we are careful 
and watchful here, I doubt not we shall 
make no mistake in the outward observ- 
ance of the day. 

The common fault of Christians consists 
in letting the world lead, instead of leading 
the world. In nothing, perhaps, is this seen 
so much as in topics of conversation. We 
let our worldly friends control the discourse, 
taking their subjects from the business or 
the trifles of daily life, while we have a per- 
fect right to introduce a religious theme, 



104 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

and yet keep silent through fear. Es- 
pecially on the Sabbath let our boldness be 
seen, and as we mingle with worldly friends 
let them see that we have higher matters to 
talk of than any they can brinqr With all 
courtesy and with all modesty, yet with all 
frankness, let us speak earnestly and grate- 
fully of Tesus, his gospel and his salvation. 
There is no need of a sombre face or of 
deep-drawn sighs. We ought to have a 
cheerful face and a merry heart, showing 
our sympathy with everybody and our 
pleasure in their welfare. Let us always 
make the Sabbath a cheerful day, as 
Phariseeism does not, and let us always 
make it a holy day, as worldliness does not. 

Its observance is an injunction, most 
precise and most solemn, of our God. 
Obedience will enrich us with unspeakable 
blessings, and disobedience will entail upon 
us grievous woes. We cannot break the 
Sabbath with impunity. Let us away with 
a conceited philosophy, and bow humbly 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 105 

before the law. It has its motive in God's 
infinite wisdom and love, and its mighty 
results will be developed in the glorious 
future before every eye, and will vindicate 
its divine Author. Then shall we be able 
to judge of the length and breadth of its 
worth and of the divine favor in its gift, 
when we shall stand purified and glorified 
with the purity and glory of our Redeemer, 
in the midst of the heavenly Sabbatism. 

Until then, let us all faithfully " remem- 
ber the Sabbath-day to keep it holy/' 



The Fifth Commandment. 



" Honor thy father and thy mother ; that thy days may be long 
tipon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." — Exodus 

XX. 12. 

THE two tables of the law are usually 
held to have been written respectively 
with regard to our duties to God and our 
duties to man. And the second table of 
the law is generally supposed to have be- 
gun with this commandment. But if there 
was an equal amount of writing on each 
table,, the commandment of the Sabbath 
would be -two-sevenths on the first tablet 
and five-sevenths on the second tablet — a 
fact which would harmonize with the view 
we have taken of the double character of 
the fourth commandment, as including both 

106 



THE FIFTH COMMAXDMEXT. 107 



our duty to God and our duty to man, and 
as exhibiting the Sabbath both as the Lord's 
day and the day for man. In either case, 
however, this commandment to honor fa- 
ther and mother is the first which looks 
entirely to a relative human duty. It is 
conspicuous among the commandments of 
the second table for another reason. It is 
the only one of these six which is not nega- 
tively expressed. The others read, "Thou 
shalt not do this or that," but this is positive : 
"Honor thy father and thy mother." There 
is yet another fact which makes it pecu- 
liarly prominent among these six command- 
ments. It has a special promise of reward 
to its observers, to which the apostle refers 
in these words : " Honor thy father and thy 
mother, which is the first commandment with 
promise, that it may be well with thee and 
thou mayest live long on the earth." 

Now, why is this command so conspicuous 
among the commandments of the law ? 
Why does it stand before and above the 



108 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



command regarding the fearful crime of 
murder, bearing these three tokens of its 
superiority? I can only account for it by 
seeing in the parental relation the type of 
God's relation to us, and hence in the duties 
of children a type of our duties to God. I 
see that obedience is the foundation of all 
effective and righteous government, involv- 
ing respect and homage toward author- 
ity, and so producing and maintaining har- 
mony in the whole ; and I see that this 
obedience is especially inculcated in the 
family, because in the highest typical sense 
the parent is as God to the children. There 
is thus a close alliance of this command 
with those of the first table, and hence we 
see it (in Leviticus) especially coupled with 
the sabbatical commandment: "Ye shall 
fear every man his mother and his father, 
and keep my Sabbaths : I am Jehovah your 
God." Lev. xix. 3. 

Let us, in meditating upon the command, 
regard, first, the promise annexed, and 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. IO9 



then, secondly, the nature of the duty en- 
joined. 

I. The Promise. — " That thy days may be 
long upon the land which the Lord thy God 
giveth thee." 

In the rehearsal of the Decalogue bv 
Moses, given in Deuteronomy v. 16, we 
find the promise expanded. This com- 
mandment, as there given, has the ad- 
ditional words, " as the Lord thy God hath 
commanded thee," and also, "and that it 
may go well with thee." So that the two 
together read thus, M Honor thy father and 
thy mother, as the Lord thy God hath com- 
manded thee, that thy days may be pro- 
longed, and that it may go well with thee, 
in the land which the Lord thy God giveth 
thee." The former of these two phrases 
adds to the solemnity and emphasis of the 
commandment, the latter to the point and 
power of the promise. It is as if God said, 
" Honor thy father and thy mother — this is 
no human expedient, but a divine order, 



110 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

founded in eternal truth ; and in the obe- 
dience of this command thou shalt prolong 
thy life, not in wretchedness and evil, but 
in a true and continual prosperity.' , 

The promise is of a long and prosperous 
life. It is so plain that it can admit of no 
other interpretation. The only question 
can be, " Is it an individual or a national 
life that is here meant ?" But this is 
answered, first, by noticing that the com- 
mand can only be kept by an individual 
person, and by a nation only as a number 
of individuals ; and hence, as the command 
is only addressed to the individual, the 
prolongation of the individual life must be 
intended. The "thy" of " thy days " must 
refer to the same person as the " thy " of 
" thy father and thy mother." It is an- 
swered, secondly, that a long national career 
of prosperity presupposes and implies a 
goodly degree of personal longevity and 
prosperity, and that the latter is a cause 
of the former, while the former could in no 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 



Ill 



sense be considered a cause of the latter. 
From these considerations, we hold that 
the promise of long life is directly and pri- 
marily to the individual who is obedient to 
this command, and then indirectly and 
secondarily to the nation of which he is a 
part. One man obeying this command 
will prolong a prosperous life, but one 
man only would not prolong the nation's 
prosperous life if all the rest of the people 
were riotous and disorderly. If, however, 
the bulk of the people should observe this 
command, then the whole national life would 
be preserved in prosperity. This is clearly 
the declaration of the promise — a promise 
which, like the command, belongs, not to 
Israel, but to the whole world. The man 
who honors his father and mother shall 
have a long and prosperous career; the 
nation which shows honor to its fathers and 
mothers, the nation wherein this filial re- 
spect is the general habit, shall have a long 
and prosperous career. We find, histori- 



112 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



cally, that the Jews were accustomed to 
cover their disrespect for parents by the 
trick of " Corban ;" and this fact reveals 
one of the secrets of their downfall. 

What the connection is between filial 
piety and a long life, other than the connec- 
tion of God's sovereign pleasure, it is not 
for us to say. We are not of those who 
feel that a natural cause must be found for 
every sequence in God's dealings, least of 
all, that it must be a natural cause within 
our limited knowledge of natural causes. 
It becomes us to be more childlike before 
God's words, to take their plain meaning, 
and not to wrest them in order to bring 
them within the reach of our petty philos- 
ophy. There is a large amount of practical 
infidelity which would take everything that 
God says and sift it through its own ration- 
alistic sieve, and boldly reject whatever will 
not pass through. It is this which would 
explain away the promise of the text by 
saying that, as a general thing, if a child 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 1 1 3 

obey his parents, he will be kept from dan- 
ger by thus using their prudence and expe- 
rience, and that the commandment has this 
general statement of a probable long life to a 
child from this natural cause. The prosperity, 
likewise, would be a prosperity which would 
naturally grow out of harmony between 
child and parent arising from the child's 
obedience, w 7 herein the parent would do 
everything to further the child's interests. 

Now, in answer to such a view, let us 
note that this is no philosophical statement 
made by man, but a promise made by God. 
It is true as God is true, not proximately 
trite, as are man's apophthegms. It can 
have no real exception, any more than the 
" Come unto me, and I will give you rest," 
or the " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, 
and thou shalt be saved," can have excep- 
tions. The man who keeps this command- 
ment is full possessor of the promise, or 
else the promise is a delusion. 

But the objector cries, " Do you mean to 

8 



114 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE, 

say that every one who has died young has 
been disobedient to his parents, for every 
one who had honored them would have 
lived to old age ?" We reply that there is 
one apparent exception — where the soul itself 
prefers to leave this world for a better, and 
where, therefore, the letter of the promise 
yields to its spirit, and God, instead of con- 
tinuing the saint upon earth, takes him to 
his desired home in heaven. Where this 
exception does not occur, we must believe 
that every one who dies before old age has 
disregarded this command. Very holy 
people are found to be defective in some 
direction. We can recall some sincerely 
pious persons who had very violent tem- 
pers, some who were very indolent, some 
who were very forgetful of others' interests. 
They would, at times, grieve over these 
errors, and perhaps gain strength against 
them, but there, nevertheless, the black 
spots on their character were visible. So 
we have seen saints who were forward in 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 115 



every good work, walking, like Zachariah 
and Elizabeth, in all the commandments of 
God blameless, patterns of holiness to the 
Church, and yet who had not faith to be- 
lieve that God would be a God of salvation 
to their children, and so their children went 
astray like the wild ass' colts. These are 
the eccentricities, the mysterious freaks of 
piety, hard to account for, but that cannot 
be denied as existing, by any Christian 
observer. In like manner, we may find 
excellent people, hearts that love Jesus 
and receive his blood of atonement, who, 
most inconsistently, are deficient in respect 
to their filial duties of reverence and regard. 

But the objector says again, " How can 
long- life be a blessing to the Christian ? Is 
not translation to heaven his desideratum ?" 
The answer is, first, that God would not 
have promised long life so often to man as 
a reward if it were not a veritable blessing. 
He remembers that we are dust, he knows 
that we are weak, he makes allowance for 



Il6 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

our low degree of faith and aspiration, he 
stoops to our level in his promise, and so 
promises us long life as a prize for faithful 
conduct in a certain direction. Secondly, 
this does not interfere with the higher de- 
sire of a Paul to depart and be with Christ, 
which is far better. 

I have seen the saints of the Lord who 
in the very spring-time of youth plumed 
their wings for their heavenly flight, who 
longed to soar away, and to whom the fairest 
attractions, and the purest, on earth <vere 
of no effect to withdraw their eager eyes 
from celestial prospects. By their own con- 
sent and desire, God could waive the fulfill- 
ment of this promise of long life because 
its very meaning was null in their case. 
But these cases are rare. To most Chris- 
tians a long life on earth is, as it was to 
Hezekiah (good man that he was), a desir- 
able boon, and God regards their feelings 
and considers it so, and therefore promises 
it on certain conditions, one of which is 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 



117 



respect to parents. " My son, forget not 
my law, but let thy heart keep my com- 
mandments, for length of days and long 
life and peace shall they add to thee." Prov. 
iii. 1, 2. " Honor thy father and thy 
mother, that thy days may be long in the 
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." 
The only other condition to which this prom- 
ise is annexed is that of " dwelling in the 
secret place of the Most High" (Ps.-xci.), in 
regard to which, of the man who habitually 
lives in the fear and faith of God, it is said by 
Jehovah, "With long life will I satisfy him." 

Thus much, then, for the promise. Let 
us now consider — 

II. The nature of the dtcty enjoined: " Hon- 
or thy father and thy mother." The word 
" cabbed " is very strong ; it strictly means 
" load with honor," and is often used 
in reference to the Deity. Obedience is 
only one of the more prominent practical 
forms of this honor. The honor strikes 
deeper than mere obedience — it touches the 



Il8 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

heart, it bespeaks the affections. It is a 
reverence inwoven in the very nature, con- 
nected with all the chords of being, and so 
coming to the surface in obedience and out- 
ward respect. We notice — i. That the 
command is not, " Honor thy father and 
thy mother when they do right!' Our pa- 
rents, like ourselves, are frail and may com- 
mit error. If their error absolved their 
children from respect, there could be no 
filial piety in the world. The ground of 
the command is in the natural relation of 
the parent, and not in his personal character. 
We are to honor our parents because they 
are parents, and not because they are saints. 
Of course this honor will not go so far as 
to commit or connive at wickedness at their 
command, for here the other commands of 
God and the principles of truth modify the 
commandment in its application. All ap- 
plications of great truth and divine com- 
mands are modified by other great truths 
and divine commands, as we have seen the 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. II9 

command to keep the Sabbath free from 
ordinary duties is modified by the laws of 
necessity and mercy. It may become a 
son's duty to disobey his father because of 
a command to do evil, or to fasten him with 
bonds because of insanity; but in every 
such exceptional case the exception stands 
boldly out as a testimony to the rule of 
obedience and respect. While the honor 
due to parents will not go to wicked or 
foolish lengths, it will go to all reasonable 
and allowable lengths. It will submit to 
inconvenience and loss ; it will hold its pri- 
vate judgment of what is better in abey- 
ance ; it will even keep its own clearly su- 
perior wisdom subject to the parental pre- 
judice. So long as conformity to the views 
and expressed wishes of parents does not 
harm any third party, a right respect for 
father and mother will gracefully yield and 
lay the self-denial on the altar of filial piety. 

The same principle teaches a jealous 
support of the reputation of parents, a 



120 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

readiness to excuse their foibles and mis- 
takes and to set off their virtues against 
their errors. It will not allow a parent to 
be ridiculed or denounced without a sol- 
emn protest; and if the fault alleged be 
true, it will go backward and reverentially 
cover the parent's sin, and so subdue the 
rebuke. 

2. The command is not, "Honor thy 
father and thy mother while thou art a 
little child? Many act as if they had no 
parents after they had reached their full 
stature, and some use this theory even 
earlier. Now, if to anybody this command 
is not given, it is to the little child, for in 
his case nature and necessity teach some 
degree of obedience and respect to parents, 
and hence the command is comparatively 
unnecessary to these. The command 
comes with peculiar force, and is especially 
directed, to children fvho have entered man- 
hood and womanhood. They are to remem- 
ber, in spite of any sense of physical or 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



121 



mental or social independence, that they 
are still the children of their parents, and 
that their parents are their parents still. 
There is no change in the relationship, only 
a change in some of the forms of its duties. 
The same honor is due at forty that was 
due at fourteen. Nowhere is filial rever- 
ence more beautiful than when exhibited 
by a mature and gifted soul. The ancients 
pictured this in their story of Anchises and 
^Eneas, and the modern Turks and Arabs 
show their appreciation of this virtue by 
casting stones at the tomb of Absalom, a 
prominent example of the opposite vice. 

The family is a heavenly institution, and, 
like the pattern shown to Moses in the 
mount, has a heavenlv meaning in all its 
relations and relative duties. Woe unto 
man if he departs from the divine pattern 
and corrupts the mysterious type ! The 
husband and wife represent Christ and his 
Church, the parents and offspring represent 
God and his children, and, above all the 



122 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

mystic relation of God the Father and God 
the Son. We only know the mere begin- 
ning of the truths that are here recorded 
in the hieroglyphic of our earthly life. We 
cannot tell what a vast perversion of truth 
we may make by the alteration of these 
symbols, nor can we measure the evil in- 
fluences and results that such a perversion 
may have, even though the hieroglyphic be 
but imperfectly understood. The only safe 
course for us is that of implicit obedience, a 
faithful adherence to the celestial organiza- 
tion of the family, in spite of the sugges- 
tions of human wisdom, however superior 
it may boast itself, and in spite of the se- 
ductions of a sinful and selfish individuality. 
When we show all deference and devotion 
to our parents, we know not what an illus- 
tration we may be giving to unseen worlds 
of the highest truth, and what an emphasis 
w r e are adding to the glory of our God. It 
is this inner connection of our outward 
domestic life which gives the deep thunder 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



123 



of the death-penalty to the lightning flash 
of the commandment in the civil polity of 
Israel. For as the host of God's people 
stood half on Gerizim and half on Ebal 
when they took solemn possession of their 
God-given land, the very second curse ut- 
tered before them — the one immediately 
following the curse upon the worshiper of 
false gods — was this : " Cursed be he that 
setteth light by his father or his mother/' 
to which the whole multitude of Israel 
shouted their responsive "Amen!" and so 
we find in the inspired code, " He that re- 
vile th his father or his mother shall surely 
be put to death." 

It is* a Jewish tradition (which bears the 
marks of authenticity and truth) that the 
man who was executed for breaking this 
law of parental regard was denied burial, 
and his body was cast into the deep, dark 
valley of Hinnom, into the place called 
Tophet, where the unclean birds of prey 
devoured it. It is to this, probably, that 



124 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

Asfur refers when he says. "The eve that 
mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey 
his mother, the ravens of the valley shall 
pick it out and the young eagles shall eat 
it." 

This peculiar severity of punishment 
marks a peculiar sanctity of the command, 
which is sustained by the very phrase we 

constantly use in regard to the virtue en- 

j <_> 

joined, namely, " filial piety." There is 
nothing, then, to limit the application of the 
commandment to childhood or youth. The 
barrier of twenty-one years is a mere hu- 
man device, useful for some questions per- 
taining to human law, but can have no effect 
whatever in regard to a divine law. The 
great moral and religious relation of parent 
and child never ceases, Even when the 
parent is dead, the parent's memory is to 
be cherished with reverential affection by 
the surviving child. This being, then, the 
purport of God's law issued to every one 
of us from Sinai, let us— 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 



125 



III. Lastly and briefly ask if there is not 
need that Gods will in this matter be often 
rehearsed in our ears. 

As already suggested, I am not disposed 
to make a special application of this com- 
mandment to children. Indeed, in reference 
to children at all, I would rather urge upon 
parents their duty to see to it that their 
children are obedient from the earliest in- 
fancy. I would say not to little children, 
" Be obedient to your parents," but rather 
to parents, " Make your children obedient." 
It is all in your power. If you indulge your 
little ones in little irreverences and little 
disobediences because it looks "so cun- 
ning," and foolish friends urge you to the 
dangerous pastime, then you will have the 
little disobedient children grow to be big 
disobedient children, and they will bring 
down your gray hairs with sorrow to the 
grave. Or if, through sheer carelessness 
and selfish laziness, you avoid the active 
watchfulness and discipline that are neces- 



126 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



sary to ensure obedience and to promote 
an obedient habit, you will obtain the same 
disastrous result. Beware, too, how, in your 
anxiety to have your boy a man before the 
time, you consent to his consequential 
swagfger at sixteen, and furnish him with a 
night-key as a help to independence, in 
which you are destroying; the bonds of 
dutiful humility and respectful submission 
with which God bound him to you at the 
first, and which God intended you to pre- 
serve. It is in this way I would apply 
the fifth commandment to young children 
through their parents, who are responsible 
before God and man, I would urge upon 
them the necessity of bearing; ever in mind 
that obedience with reverential regard is 
the very rivet which holds the family to- 
gether, that every other fault can better be 
tolerated in a child than disobedience or 
disrespect, and that from this sin spring 
most leoitimatelv and fruitfullv all other 
forms of filial iniquity and family distress. 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 12? 



But I also make the special application 
of the text to children of maturer growth — 
to you who are grown to man's estate, to 
you who are married and have families of 
your own, and who have perhaps that rich 
blessing of God in your house, a grand- 
mother. Let your continued reverence for 
your parent or parents still living be of 
itself a glorious example, deeply written on 
the thoughts and future memories of your 
own children. Surround the old age which 
adorns and honors your household with 
the tribute of your assiduous care, jealous 
of its comfort and its dignity, and cover its 
defects with the mantle (not of your charity, 
but) of your filial love and sympathy. I 
have seen an aged father made to act as 
clerk to his rich son in this city. I have 
seen an aged mother sent up into a mean 
garret in order to give room for the young 
vanities who called her son their father, and 
you have all seen instances of similar defi- 
ance to this fundamental family law which 



128 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



God has stamped on nature as well as pub- 
lished by the writing of his own finger. It 
is for us, who look to the Lord Jesus in his 
obedience to his Father as our hope and 
stay eternal, to regard all such disrespect to 
parents as we regard theft, falsehood and 
murder, and to shrink from either the letter 
or the spirit of a violation of this fifth com- 
mandment. Blessed is that house which 
preserves the beautiful symmetry of the 
family group as the grapes cluster grace- 
fully about the stem, and where all the do- 
mestic virtues find their principle of union 
and development in their common connec- 
tion with a pervading filial piety. It is in 
such a house that we may expect to find 
the Master as a welcome guest, for there is 
the spirit of heaven. 



The Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and 
Ninth Commandments. 



" Thou shalt not kill. 
Thou shalt not commit adultery. 
Thou shalt not steal. 

Thou shalt not bear false fvitness against thy neighbor" 

Exodus xx. 13, 14, 15, 16. 

IT must be very noticeable to every 
reader of the Decalogue that its com- 
mands are nearly all prohibitions. There 
are but two exceptions in the ten — the com- 
mandment of the Sabbath and that of 
respect to parents. All the rest enjoin 
upon man, not to perform, but to abstain. 
This fact exhibits sin as an ever-acting 
principle which man is called upon to 
thwart. This principle acts against God 
and against our fellow-man, and its cessa- 

9 129 



130 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

tion of energy can only be founded on a 
love to God stronger than love to self, and 
a love to our neighbor equal to the love 
of self. So when God commands us to 
cease from sin, he is really bidding us to be 
holy. By putting his commandments in 
this form, he is showing us the positive 
character of our sins, and our true hostility 
to him while under the sway of sin. He 
shows us that, so far from imposing a new 
task upon us, he is only requiring that we 
should renounce the old tasks which we, 
as the servants of sin, have assumed ; that 
thus in our differences with him it is we 
that have left him and not he that has left 
us, and that religion is seeking the true by 
giving up the false — a process which the 
Scriptures teach us is rendered possible 
only by the redeeming work of the Lord 
* Jesus Christ. 

This method of announcing God's will 
to man is eminently adapted to bring out 
into clear relief man's responsibility. It is 



SIXTH TO NINTH COMMANDMENTS. I 3 I 

man who has broken the harmony- — it is his 
to restore it. It is man who has rebelled — 
it is his to give up his rebellion. His activ- 
ities are running counter to God's will and 
law, and in the verv nature of the case he 
must negative this counteraction in order 
to be at peace with God. 

This view of man's condition as a positive 
sinner summoned to cease his sin, rather 
than a neutral urged to a positive work, 
also shows us in very deep colors the won- 
derful grace of God, which is the more 
wonderful, not that it comes to help man 
in an arbitrarily imposed work, but to run 
after him in his wayward folly and restore 
him to a position he had forfeited : M God 
commendeth his love toward us, in that 
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." 

In examining the ten commandments thus 
far, we have seen that the first three en- 
joined a reverence for God in his essence 
and expression, and the next two enjoined 
the same reverence by ways promotive of 



132 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

man's highest interests — namely, the observ- 
ance of God's holy day and respect for 
parental authority, which is the type and 
reflection of the divine authority. Through 
this last we find our way into the command- 
ments which refer exclusively to our duty 
to man. Of these there are five. The 
first four we group together. They each 
read, " Thou shalt not injure thy fellow- 
man!' 

We cannot injure God — we can only act 
irreverently and carelessly toward God, and 
so injure, not him, but ourselves — but our 
fellow-man we can positively injure, and it 
is a prime temptation in the race of life to 
gain on our fellow, not by our diligence, but 
by thrusting him down. Sin has made us 
natural enemies to one another, Ishmaelites, 
whose hands are against every man, and 
everv man's hand against us. The selfish 
beast who crowds out his neighbor from the 
crib or even tears him in pieces to destroy 
his rivalship is but a pattern of man if the 



SIXTH TO XI NTH COMMANDMENTS. I 3 3 

restraints of society and providence, from 
without, be withdrawn. 

Man's condition by nature is not seen in 
man's condition in England, France or civ- 
ilized America, but in man's condition in 
the savage island of the Pacific, where the 
heavenly rays of the gospel have least pen- 
etrated. The civilizations of Christianity 
exhibit, not humanity, but Christianity. The 
civilizations of ancient Persia, Greece and 
Rome (although a little revelation filtered 
through upon them) exhibit humanity, in its 
best estate, as a refined selfishness, where 
every man seeks (adroitly, perhaps, and not 
openly) to injure his neighbor. But even 
the external refinement of these unchristian 
civilizations may be traced to that which 
divine grace has, through its revelation, 
superimposed upon the sinful race of man. 
Man, left to himself is the savage, the can- 
nibal, the beast ! 

The injury which man can do to his fel- 
low-man can be divided into four kinds — 



134 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

injury to person, injury to society, injury 
to property and injury to reputation. The 
four commandments of the Decalogue in re- 
lation to man's injury of man respectively 
relate to these four forms of human injus- 
tice. " Thou shalt not kill " regards any 
assault on the person ; " thou shalt not com- 
mit adultery/' any assault on society ; " thou 
shalt not steal," any assault on property; 
and " thou shalt not bear false witness," any 
assault on reputation. Harm from my fel- 
low-man can reach me only through one of 
these four channels, and I can do harm to 
another only through the same. 

When God surrounded man by the circle 
of his grace and made him a probationer 
amid the opportunities of glory, he thereby 
made man's person sacred. Enough of the 
image of God was left by the very proximity 
of this grace to fence around man's person 
from a violence which would be sacrilege. 
So we hear God, when Noah and his sons 
were recommencing the history of the 



SIXTH TO NINTH COMMANDMENTS, 1 35 



world, declaring, "At the hand of every 
man's brother will I require the life of man. 
Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall 
his blood be shed ; for in the image of God 
made he man." Whatever there was of 
sanctity in the person of a man was the 
result of the godly implantation maintained 
in the conscience by the continual grace of 
God. When that spark was allowed to be 
put out, then man's sacredness of person 
was at an end. The souls that have gone 
beyond the region of God's long-suffering 
have no longer a fortified personality. They 
are left open to the unrestrained attacks of 
malevolence. A man in hell is unchecked 
in his aggressions upon others, and no 
sacredness of person checks aggressions 
upon himself. There is no law against 
murder in that lower realm, for the law and 
the sacredness of the person are both of 
God, and everything that is godly has with- 
drawn from the eternal chaos of sin, to dwell 
for ever among the trophies of the victories 



I36 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

of grace. But here upon earth, where grace 
marks the history of every day, with each 
of us, in kind providential dealings, in abili- 
ties and in opportunities, the human person 
is sacred and the law against its injury in 
full and hopeful force. The king's person 
is called sacred, but God recognizes the 
person of the humblest peasant to be as 
sacred as the person of a king, the sacred- 
ness being not in the royalty, but in the 
manhood, of the man, through grace crea- 
tive, grace administrative and grace re- 
demptive. It is against such a one that 
God says, " Do no injury." 

" Do not kill " merely marks out the limit 
of the injury to the person. But it is like 
a sien-board on the borders of an estate — it 
includes the whole estate. It embraces in 
its comprehensive brevity murder in em- 
bryo as well as murder in maturity. It 
points to the word and thought and feeling 
of murder as well as to the overt act. If, 
in one sense, man is anointed of the Lord, 



SIXTH TO XIXTH COMMANDMENTS. I 37 

and hence the killing him is sin, it is just as 
truly sin to lift up the hand in threat, to 
open the mouth to revile, or to think evil 
against the Lord's anointed. It is thus that 
our Saviour interprets this law when he 
sees denounced in it the^Raca" and the 
"More"* of the an^rv man. Our brother 
man's body is a temple of God, actual or 
possible, and the respect for that divine 
temple is to begin in the heart, and by this 
respect our tendency to ridicule, to despise 
or to neglect is to be overcome. 

By a parity of reasoning, we are not 
simply to abstain from the overt act of 
adultery, which irrevocably destroys the 
ties of family and friendship and makes 
society a wreck, but the whole field of im- 
purity is to be abandoned by our thoughts. 
The roots of the crime are to be destroyed 
as well as the stalk that appears above 
ground to human observation. It is not 
that the thought has a tendency to lead to 

* " Thou fool" or " thou rebel." 



I38 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

the act, but that the thought is wrong in 
itself; and even if it never go farther, the 
sin has been committed. It is one of the 
prominent deceptions of sin to make the 
outward act the crime, and hence to justify 
base thoughts and imaginations if they be 
only confined to the individual mind. But 
before God the crime is in the immoral po- 
sition of the heart — a crime which can be ex- 
aggerated in its earthly results, but not in 
its intrinsic viciousness, by a development 
in action. The very condemnation of the 
world over whom God sent the deluge was 
that " every imagination of the thoughts of 
men's hearts was only evil continually/' 
and the same pure and holy God, who 
visited those antediluvians first with his 
grace, and then with his judgment, is he 
with whom we have to do, who desires 
" truth in the inward parts " and who 
recognizes sin as a matter of the heart. 
Moreover, just as anger is an injury to 
the person of the object, inasmuch as it 



SIXTH TO NINTH COMMANDMENTS. I 39 

degrades and profanes him in our eyes, 
so impurity is an injury to society, inasmuch 
as it lowers our estimate of the social bond 
and weakens it so far as we are concerned. 

The position of the heart in each of these 
cases is a wrong done to our fellow, and in 
this way we see the true scope of the com- 
mandments, to which our Saviour gave no 
addition in his Sermon on the Mount, but 
only an interpretation. The anger and 
impurity which he forbade are found in 
the killing and committing adultery which 
the law of Sinai forbade. The Sermon on 
the Mount is only an echo of the Law on 
the Mount. 

Society is sacred because the individual 
man is sacred ; and as there is an image of 
God in every man, so there is a symbol and 
type of the heavenly family in human society, 
and its bonds of blood, affinity and friend- 
ship have a divine element in them. Society 
is no'more man-made than is man himself 
man-made, and he who dares to set at 



140 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

naught its holy bonds in act or in heart is 
an enemy to God and truth. The man who 
reads licentious novels, or indulges in lasciv- 
ious dancing", or countenances the nudities * 
of so-called art, in life, image or picture, 
when God made and gave clothes to man 
and woman, thus sets himself against God 
and undermines the structure of holiness 
which God himself has built for our g-ood 
and his own glory. 

The injuries to property and reputation 
bear a strong- analogy to the injuries to the 
person and society, " Thou shalt not steal " 
and " Thou shalt not bear false witness " 
contain the same implication of man's sa- 
credness seen in the murder prohibition. 
A man's property and reputation are sacred, 
not because they are property and reputa- 
tion, but because they are man's property 
and reputation. Property is the adjunct of a 

* The Cupids, Psyches, Apollos, Unas and Venuses, multiplying 
in our parlors, and becoming more and more wanton in posture 
and color, show the public preference of Greek heathenism to a 
chaste Christianity. 



SIXTH TO NINTH COMMANDMENTS. 1 4 1 

man in his own keeping, and reputation is the 
adjunct of a man in the keeping of society. 

Stealing is not wrong as simply incon- 
veniencing our neighbor, as a utilitarian 
philosophy would teach. An act of theft 
might never be known to our neighbor, and 
yet it would be just as much an act of theft 
as if it had brought him to poverty. It in- 
jures our neighbor in his status in our re- 
gard and estimation, where he has a right 
to stand respected and honored. Because 
he is not aware of the injury, it is no less 
an injury. I may intercept treasure coming 
to another, and he never know of the in- 
tended gift or of my interference, but I 
have foully wronged him, nevertheless. It 
is a crime against the individual man's 
sacred majesty, and not to be measured at 
all by visible results. Counting damages 
is a low, carnal way of reckoning the weight 
of a crime. It may do for a police regula- 
tion in outward society, but it is of no value 
in the spiritual realm. There the crime has 



I42 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



a character in itself outside of any visible 
consequences. It is branded as an enmity 
to God. So overwhelmingly does this view 
of the sin press itself upon the fully awak- 
ened sinner that a David who has commit- 
ted adultery and murder, and thus assaulted 
man socially and personally, cries out, in the 
bitterness of his anguish of remorse before 
God, " Against thee, thee only, have I sin- 
ned." The harm to man disappears in the 
insult to God which gives its deepest color 
to the crime. 

It is this innate character of our injury 
of man which extends the law against theft 
to all forms of withdrawing or withholding 
from our neighbor whatever might be rightly 
counted as his, whether of material estate, 
of personal ability in body or mind, or of 
advantages and opportunities. I not only 
must not take away my neighbor's watch, 
but I must not stand in the way of the use 
of his means of personal benefit, I must 
not lessen his chances of success by adverse 



SIXTH TO NINTH COMMANDMENTS. 1 43 

processes and I must not encroach unne- 
cessarily upon his time and system. If I 
prosper by defeating him, as in gambling or 
mercantile trickery (called shrewdness), I am 
robbing him. So in regard to his reputa- 
tion. I am to be judged as much in regard 
to my silence as my speech concerning him. 
If I have kept his reputation from growing, 
by keeping silent when I ought to have 
spoken for him, I am as much guilty of 
bearing false witness as if I had opened my 
mouth in slander. I have not regarded 
him with that respect with which it became 
me to regard one made in the imaofe of God. 
I have done this evil in God's sight and 
against him. 

It is from this view of these commands that 
we rightly understand our Saviour's decla- 
ration that the whole of the second table is 
summed up in the one spiritual law : " Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." A true 
love for our fellow-man will alone prevent 
these four styles of injury. 



144 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



Love is beneficent, selfishness is malevo- 
lent, and there is no neutral ground between 
them. The love of our neighbor as our- 
selves regards each man as possessing the 
same sacred character which we personally 
possess, and thus makes us jealous for our 
neighbor's rights and welfare. And this 
sacred character, as we have seen, is only 
found in the image of God which we bear, so 
that the whole of the law has one grand foun- 
dation, reverence for God. This principle, 
and not any philosophical speculation about 
natural rights, is the root of the entire ten 
commandments. So Ave see in fact that a 
morality based on natural rights is always a 
failure, both from the vague definitions of 
natural rights and the ease with which 
human lust or ambition will resist and over- 
come such a motive, while a morality based 
on regard for God, a reverential love for his 
holy name, is never a failure. This is a re- 
ligious morality, the only one to be trusted. 

The whole formula, then, of the law, as 



SIXTH TO NINTH COMMANDMENTS, 1 45 

seen through the gospel, is this : " Love God, 
and love man for God's sake, through Jesus 
Christ, the God-man. " 

This is the great argument ; but while 
pressing it, we do not forget that there are 
many collateral and subordinate arguments, 
and some low minds need the lower argu- 
ments. To one man it is enough to say, 
" Do not steal, because it dishonors God," 
but to another you may be obliged to say, 
" Do not steal, or you will go to prison. " 
The consequences to one's self of violating 
the four commands under consideration are 
usually treated of in connection with the 
subject. We are satisfied to pass them by 
with a word. The murderer, the adulterer, 
the thief and the liar, even in their begin- 
nings of anger, impurity, acquisitiveness 
and deceit, are soul-suicides. They are 
pressing out from their souls all that is 
divine, obliterating God's imao-e, shaking off 
the kind fetters of grace, and so removing 

the very foundation from what remains to 
10 



146 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

them of hope and peace. You who are 
secretly breaking these commandments in 
your heart are poisoning your whole moral 
system. Even if you may be a miser with- 
out hurting your neighbor (which we deny), 
yet you can't be a miser without hurting 
yourself. The angry man slays himself ; 
the lewd soul pollutes itself ; the miser 
robs himself, and the slanderer destroys his 
own reputation. There is no resisting the 
sequence of sin and punishment, except in 
permitting the interference of divine grace 
which saves from punishment, and, going 
farther, saves from sin, which presents the 
Lord Jesus as the victim for sin and the 
Holy Ghost as the cleanser from sin. 
Without this divine grace, each one of us 
must pursue his sins to the bitter end. In 
Christ pardon and holiness are twin gifts. 
u The wages of sin is death, but the gift of 
God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our 
Lord." " Hereby we know that he abideth 
in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us." 



The Tenth Commandment. 



" Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet 
thy neighbors wife, ?ior his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, 
nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor* s"~ — ■ 
Exodus xx. 17. 



X demand upon the inmost heart for its 
true relation toward God, and they end with 
an appeal to the inmost heart in regard to 
man's true relation to his fellow. Having- 
given four prohibitions of outward injury 
toward our neighbor, which legitimately 
refer to the position of the affections, the 
Decalogue expressly gathers up the prohibi- 
tions into a direct injunction upon the soul. 
"Thou shalt not covet " prohibits the very 
source of murder, adultery, theft and slan- 
der. In thus closing his law to all men for 




commandments begin with a 



147 



I48 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



all time, the Most High shows that a heart- 
service to man, as to himself, is all that he 
can recognize as true. He judges not ac- 
cording to any outward appearance, but he 
looks to the heart. There is the individ- * 
uality, the personality, the man. 

Here is the fundamental difference be- 
tween human and divine law. Human law 
has to do with the outward act primarily 
and principally, and with the motive only 
secondarily and proximately. It seeks as 
its ultimates for outward peace, not for in- 
ward truth. But the divine law deals 
directly with the motive and heart-principle, 
and with the outward act only as flowing 
forth from the motive. Inward truth — 
" truth in the inward parts," as David 
expresses it — is the holy and just aim and 
requirement of the infinitely holy God. 
Truth, religion, duty (whatever you may 
call it), is a spiritual matter, and hence the 
place of obedience and reform is within. 
" God is a spirit, and they that worship him 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 1 49 



must worship him in spirit and in truth." 
All attempts at an outward conformity to 
God's law without the inward life are but 
the paintings of a corpse into the semblance 
of life. The clean heart, the new life, is 
what alone can meet the demands of the 
Decalogue. 

This grand truth, so readily assented to 
and so readily set aside, is shadowed forth 
in our own demands of our children. Who 
of us wishes his children to be obedient 
automata? Who would be satisfied with a 
family that went by mechanical machinery ? 
Do we not expect love as the principle in 
the movements of the household ? And if 
love is found to be wanting in the child, is 
not his legalistic obedience, his strictness 
with regard to the letter, almost an offence 
to us? Can we hold these most proper 
practical views of earthly relationships, and 
yet suppose that God can be satisfied with 
anything less than the heart in his children ? 

The ten commandments, as we see, begin 



150 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 

and end with this view of his fatherly will 
concerning us, and yet, with strange per- 
versity, men are continually, like the young 
ruler in the Gospel, quoting this holy law as 
a " touch-not, taste-not, handle-not" law, to 
be obeyed by ceremonial exactness or by 
ascetic precision. 

There is a still higher view of this com- 
mandment against covetousness than its 
reference to our inward relation to our fel- 
low-man. The Holy Spirit has himself 
shown its reference to our direct relation to 
God when he has explained covetousness 
to be idolatry. In Col. iii. 5 we read: " Mor- 
tify, therefore, your members which are 
upon the earth, fornication, uncleanness, 
inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and 
covetousness, which is idolatry and again, 
in Eph. v. 5 : " For this ye know, that no 
whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor cov- 
etotts man, who is an idolater, hath any in- 
heritance in the kingdom of Christ." This 
last commandment brings us back to the 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT. 1 5 I 

first. We started with God and we end 
with God. We find that if our true rela- 
tion with God be maintained, then all other 
relations will adjust themselves rightly, and 
that our duty to our neighbor is founded on 
our duty to God. This thought, as taught 
in God's word, will dissipate any hopes we 
may have formed from human schemes of 
philanthropy and social progress. The 
systems of Fourier and St. Simon have ut- 
terly failed, from ignoring the love of God 
as the source of all philanthropy, supposing 
that we could be rightly disposed toward 
our fellow-man without any regard to our 
relations toward God, or often supposing 
what was nearly equivalent — that our con- 
duct toward our fellow 7 was the whole of 
religion. Let us, then, have this lesson 
deeply impressed upon our hearts from our 
examinations of God's holy law — that love 
to man is but an offshoot of love to God, 
that our relative duties upon earth must 
derive their worth and efficiency from our 



152 



THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 



positive devotion to our heavenly Father, 
and that hence the one thing- needful for 
every man is the yielding of his heart to 
God. 

With these thoughts we may proceed 
more wisely to consider the meaning of the 
tenth commandment. Let us endeavor to 
answer four questions: What is coveting? 
What are the objects which we must not 
covet ? What is the harm of coveting ? 
And, How can we avoid coveting ? 

I. What is coveting? On looking at 
the Hebrew word here used, " hhamad," we 
find that it is used of righteous conduct, as 
for example, in Ps. lxviii. 16: " This is the hill 
which God desireth (lit., coveteth, or hhamad) 
to dwell in." So in Song of Solomon ii. 3 : 
"I sit down under his shadow with great 
delight," which is literally, " I covet to sit 
down in his shade." And so the equivalent 
word in Greek (gyAoo)), used by the apostle 
James in the passages, " Ye kill and desire 
or covet to have," is also used in such pas- 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT, I 5 3 

sages as these in the first Epistle of Paul 
to the Corinthians : " Covet to prophesy," " 
" Covet earnestly the best gifts." The 
Hebrew word is really but expressive of 
a strong controlling desire. Every man has 
such a desire. The soul is so constituted 
that it cannot act but through its desires, and 
one desire must always, from the necessity 
of the case, be the leader in any particular 
action. These desires may be enlightened 
through the intelligence and their interrela- 
tions thus changed, but they will always re- 
main the springs of life. As a man thinketh 
or desireth in his heart, so is he, whatever 
may repress the visible exhibition of his 
character. 

Coveting, then, as simply " ardent desire," 
is not forbidden per se in the commandment, 
but a special form of coveting, determined 
by the objects enumerated. The good or 
evil of a desire is measured by its object 
and the relations of that object to ourselves. 
Not by its object alone, for I may desire 



154 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

another man's house ; the house is a very 
good house, but the desire is a very bad 
desire, because the relations of that house 
to me are such as to condemn the desire. 
My desire, therefore, as to its goodness or 
badness, is to be determined by the object 
and its relation to me. Indeed, on close 
examination, it will be found that nothing 
(unless it be a rational, moral being itself) 
is intrinsically bad, that no object which I 
can desire is in itself evil, that all the bad 
and the evil is really in the relation it bears 
to me if I use it or seek it. Prussic acid in 
itself is not bad — -it is just as good as bread 
or milk ; but it would be evil in me to use 
or seek prussic acid as my food, because its 
relation to me in that case would be perni- 
cious. We are often confused by words. 
We apply the words good and bad to moral 
good and evil, and also to mere physical 
properties, and then draw false conclusions 
from this, which logicians call an " ambigu- 
ous middle." Moral good or evil requires 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT. 155 

a rational responsible agent ; the good or 
evil is in the relation between this rational 
responsible agent and the object of his de- 
sire or use. The Q-ood or evil is not in the 
object, but in me as acting on or toward 
the object. The coveting, then, in this com- 
mandment, having reference to the peculiar 
relation subsisting between certain objects 
and ourselves, let us proceed to the second 
question. 

II. What are the objects which we must 
not covet? "Thou shalt not covet thy 
neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy 
neighbor s wife, nor his man-servant, nor 
his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, 
nor anything that is thy neighbor's. " 

The special objects here enumerated are 
not exhaustive, but only representative of 
a large class. The last clause denotes the 
wide range from which the enumerated ob- 
jects are taken as specimens. The house, 
the wife, the servants, the cattle, represent 
the four principal departments of a man's 



I56 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

earthly establishment- — namely, his material 
possessions, his family, his household and 
his "live-stock." They illustrate and tend 
to define the comprehensive phrase, "any- 
thing that is thy neighbor's." 

It is in this last phrase we particularly 
trace the answer to our question. If any- 
thing belongs to our neighbor, either by 
the tie of property, as a house, or by the 
tie of domestic union, as a wife, it thereby 
partakes of the sacredness of his own per- 
son, and is so to be viewed by us. The 
coveting any such object for ourselves is 
directly at war with this view. It pollutes 
this sanctity, it destroys in our heart the 
harmony of things and introduces confusion. 
It is against this form of coveting that the 
command of God lifts itself. Anything ap- 
pertaining to our neighbor is in such rela- 
tion to us as to condemn all coveting. The 
elements of his wealth, his happiness, his 
fame, his success, are all included. His time, 
his talents, his opportunities, his advantages, 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



157 



so far as they are peculiarly his and are not 
common to all, are in the same category. 

When we consider that the injury to our 
neighbor is the basis of the wrong in cov- 
eting, and that this injury receives its cha- 
racter from the image of God in man, Ave 
can derive the legitimate corollary that we 
have no right to covet anything which will 
injure ourselves ; for God's own compend of 
the second table of the law is, " Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself!' Indeed, we 
can deduce this conclusion in another w T ay, 
thus : Our health of body and soul is a 
blessing to our neighbor ; it is so much 
benefit and profit to him ; it goes (or should 
go) to make up the sum of his happiness. 
Now, then, we have no right to harm that 
health of body or soul, for then we shall 
be harming our neighbor. If I covet any- 
thing injurious to my own personal effi- 
ciency as a member of society, I am plotting 
against my neighbor, I have begun an at- 
tack upon him. What a wide horizon this 



158 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

sweeps ! " Thou shalt not covet anything 
that is thy neighbor's !" 

III. What is the harm of coveting? The 
objector may say, " If the coveting goes so 
far as to become overt crime, I see the 
harm ; but what is the harm of coveting if 
systematically restrained from outward ac- 
tion, if indulged only in the heart ?" The 
reply is, first, no system can restrain it. 
You might as well say, " I will put the coal 
of fire inside the gunpowder-keg and shut 
it up there tight." But if the supposition 
could be true, and you could indulge in and 
cultivate a coveting which would never go 
farther, there are two directions of evil 
which even we can detect — God may see a 
thousand more. We can see, first, that it 
degrades our neighbor in our hearts. If he 
is the object of our hypothetical plunder, 
he is necessarily lowered in our estimation. 
But as we have considered this thought in 
a former chapter, we pass to the second, 
which is — 



THE TENTH COMMAND ME XT I 59 

That we are musing the brood of sin in 
our souls. Sins always group together. 
They are like cowards — one never goes 
alone. If I allow evil desire a harbor in 
my heart, my standard of morality will be 
lowered, I shall grow reckless, shall care 
less for what is holy and just and good, 
shall neglect duties generally, and in this 
way conform my life to the evil desire 
which, like persistent leaven, will leaven the 
whole lump. The human heart and life is 
like the exquisite machinery of a watch. 
If you 'put one wheel off its axis, you de- 
range the whole working. You cannot be 
sinful in one part only of the soul ; man's 
life is an ultimate unit, and has no parts. 
We talk of the different pai-ts of a man's 
mind, but this is a language used to assist 
our feeble comprehension. Sin in the desire 
is sin in the man — the entire man ; so that 
the harm done by coveting what is not our 
own is just the harm done by sin when wel- 
comed to the heart. It is spiritual corrup- 



l6o THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

tion- — gangrene. You can hide it from hu- 
man observation, but that does not stop the 
inner destruction for a moment. You are 
carefully cherishing the eggs of envy, jeal- 
ousy, malice, anger and revenge, when you 
indulge in your unhallowed desires ; and 
these dire monsters will be hatched and be- 
come your irresistible masters before you 
are aware. How pressing, then, our fourth 
question ! 

IV. How shall we avoid this evil coveting ? 
Will any mere order from the intelligence 
be heeded by the wild desire ? Or can any 
magic power be invoked to slay the desire 
and save the man ? Full of depravity, 
which is seen first in these wicked desires 
of the heart, we listen hopefully to God's 
word sent to us by his saving love : " Set 
your affection on things above, not on things 
on the earth/' Here is the wisdom from 
above, the philosophy of heaven. The de- 
sires of the heart are not to be annihilated, 
man is not to be reduced to an inert lump, his 



THE TEXTH COMMA XD ME XT. l6l 



passions are to burn as brightly as ever, his 
eager heart to beat as strongly, his eye to 
sparkle with anticipation and his energies 
to leap as actively as before, yet not for 
worldly jewels, but for heaven's crown. The 
current is to run as swiftly as before, but 
now in a new channel. We are to seek first — 
that is, as chief— the kingdom of God and 
his righteousness. 

This glorious specific, this complete rem- 
edy, may have either a special or a general 
application. A man may find a single evil 
desire temporarily affecting him. With a 
Christian heart he remembers that his Re- 
deemer is ever at hand. He calls out in 
the agony of his self-reproach amid the 
perplexity of his divided soul ; and in turn- 
ing to his Saviour, his affections are with- 
drawn from the passing evil and restored 
to their healthy channel. The contempla- 
tion of Jesus is the application of a magnet 
to attract the desires of his soul. This is 

a frequent experience of the renewed, and 
11 



1 62 THOUGHTS OX THE DECALOGUE. 



gives peculiar lustre to the words of the 
apostle, " Looking unto Jesus." 

It is this remedy which awaits the use of 
you who are disturbed because of your 
worldly longings. You are writing bitter 
things against yourselves, and feel almost 
ready to despair of Christian attainment. 
The great truth should be understood by 
you that you will never cease to have these 
worldlv lon^ing-s until Christ becomes so 
lovely in some forms of his character or 
work as to draw off these energies of de- 
sire from their unworthy channel. Over- 
come every special worldliness by a special 
heavenly contemplation. And so, generally, 
let me assure the unconverted that their 
depraved desires will never cease until holy 
desires take their place. "Thou shalt not 
covet thy neighbor's," can never be obeyed 
until you learn to covet your own — those 
blessed gifts of heavenly grace which God 
urges upon you, and which properly belong 
to you. Each of you, my unregenerate 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT. 



163 



readers, is to be renewed, if at all, by taking 
these very desires which are now bounding 
after the world and turning them to the 
Lord Jesus. You see at once that it will 
be an act on your part, an effort, but an act 
and effort that will save your soul. Is not 
the act worth taking ? Is it not perilous to 
postpone the effort? The Lord is waiting 
for your reply. 

In our examination of the Decalogue we 
have especially noted the following points : 

I. That it is God's law for all men of all 
ages. 

II. That none can appreciate it and obey 
it but those who have been saved by divine 
grace. 

III. That it is eminently and intensely a 
spiritual law, demanding truth in the inward 
parts. 

IV. That it teaches us directly to honor 
God in his essence and expression (avoid- 
ing a false expression and using the true 



164 THOUGHTS ON THE DECALOGUE. 

with deep reverence), and to honor our 
fellow-man as bearing the image of God, 
avoiding his injury in either act, thought or 
feeling, and that it is thus summed up by 
the formula: "Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor 
as thyself." 

We thus see that the gospel is not an- 
tagonistic to the law, but a divine way for 
us to keep the law, and that while the gos- 
pel saves, in the very act of saving us it 
gives us the law as our rule of life — that 
holy law which God never intended to be- 
come obsolete, but which reflects his own 
holiness and is as eternal as is God himself. 
Do you love that law? There is no better 
proof of your salvation. Do you not love 
it? Then go to Jesus, that he may teach 
you how to love it by teaching you how 
TO LOVE HIM. 



0/ 



